I'm recently coming to FM6 from MS Access and am stumped about how to extract information from the database via a cross tab query or its equivalent.

Thanks in advance.

Owen

What is a cross tab query? It is something special of just what Access called search?

In FileMaker you can perform a Find in which you can setup multiple find criteria and also omit record from the find.

The cross tab query calculates a sum (or other calculation) of two types of extracted information from the database that is displayed along the left margin and across the top border, aka cross tab.

Will the FM6 "Find" do this?

Owen

No, FM6 find will not do this. It is really too bad that FileMaker doesn't make this easier, it is a very common report format. You will have to build a report layout for this purpose. What are your row and column fields?

Kurt, an example of a cross tab report would have months across the top of the report, sales person name as the row header, and monthly sales at each row/column intersection. *IF* you have real data for every instance, then it's actually easy and a standard multicolumn report will do the job. But if there are "holes" in the data you can't do it this way.

This is also an excellent place to use repeating fields. You almost never want to use repeats as the original data source - but they can definitely be used for reporting. So in the example you would have a 12-repeat to hold sales person monthly sales totals. Getting the data into the repeats is the issue.

Hi Bruce,

What, no AppleScript?

Lee