Wrapping text and formatting

[Dimwhit]

I have two questions, one of which I'm pretty sure belongs in this forum (just found this place).

1. I'm creating a layout that contains an image field and a text field that usually has several paragraphs of text. I want to have the text wrap around the image field, but I can't seem to find any way to do that. Is it possible?

2. Same layout, the text won't format because it's formatted in Browse mode. Fine. I go to browse mode, but I can't find any way to remove formatting from the text. Is that doable? I know it can be exported, then re-imported, but I'm a little shaky on that, and I have a couple hundred records I'd have to do it with. (The records contains many more fields than the two going into this layout.)

So anyway, thanks much for the help.

[BobWeaver]

1. No, sorry, Filemaker isn't a page layout program. It's report formatting capabilities are better than many databases, but it can't wrap text around images. If you need to produce really fancy reports, then you might want to look at exporting the data into Pagemaker or Quark Xpress.

2. The easiest way to strip text formatting is to run it through a text calculation. Go to the field you want to unformat and then select "replace contents..." from the records menu. Choose calculated result, and then in the formula dialog enter the name of the field that you are editing. This will replace the data in the field with an unformatted copy of itself. This will unformat the text in this field in ALL records in the current found set. So, you only have to do it once. But...

***WARNING***

Back up your file first. The replace command can very easily destroy a lot of data in a single step if you enter the wrong thing in the formula.

[Dimwhit]

Brilliant!! Thanks BobWeaver, that unformatting trick was exactly what I was looking for. Much appreciated.

Bummer about the layout, but I can't complain too much.