I'm a newbie using trial version to see if I can replace Paradox.

I'm creating a complex directory which includes several fields which are empty for some records. If the field is empty, I want to hide the field name (which seems to end up as just text on the layout, rather than attached to the field itself). I thought "slide" would work but it just controls what is in the field boundry. Anybody know how to do this? an example would be "Business Tel" followed by the Btel field. I don't want to see the label if they have no busness tel.

Thanks,

Ed

Welcome to Filemaker. I hope you find it the ideal technology replacement for your Paradox system.

The way you would do that is to create a separate calculation field out of the label. Basically the field's calculation would be: if (isempty(btel)=0, "Business Tel",""). Translated literally, "if business telephone number field is not empty, then show the label "Business Tel", otherwise show nothing."

Now this would not be ideal if you had a lot of fields that you wanted to do this with, you'd have a heck of a lot of fields after a while. Hope this answers your question.

Kevin,

Thanks, I'll give it a try

Ed

I'm just thinking out loud and not to deeply at that, so I could make a score of thinking errors here , but could one maybe create one 'field label' field in a 'masterdata' table, where the calc to fill these labels is done centrally, by having these labels all consult that 'masterdata label field'? The calc would be something like

Case

field X on layout X is not empty, then fill it with 'label x' otherwise fill it with ""

same for field Y on layout Y

same for field Z on layout Z

add fields/labels as appropriate