doing calculations involving all records?

[sunbird]

Hi all, I'm new here and to Filemaker, hoping someone can help me out...

I am trying to analyze the results of a couple hundred surveys. The results of each survey are stored in a single record of a single table. What I want to do is perform calculations involving all the survey results, and I need to do things slightly more involved than simple sums and counts (more advanced than what you can do with a summary field, in other words - at least as far as I know).

For example, one question might ask if the person plays soccer, football and/or baseball, and another ask whether the person lives in Toronto, Austin or Los Angeles. I want to be able to figure out things like the total number of people that play football, the number of people that play both football and baseball, the number of people that play soccer and live in Austin, etc.

I am pretty stumped as to how to do this. As far as I can tell, this can't be done with calculation fields by themselves (can it?), so I was thinking to just set up a script to cycle through all the records for a given table (= all the surveys), perform all calculations and then dump the values in a separate table at the end. However, I can't even figure out how to tell Filemaker to manipulate the records one by one. My programming experience is mainly in C (which I am decent at that though not stellar), and I'm feeling pretty lost at the moment trying to work with Filemaker.

Any help would be much appreciated...

[mr_vodka]

You should be just able to perform a find with the criteria that you are looking for. For your example it would be:

Enter Find Mode []

Set Field [sports; "football"]

New Record/Request

Set Field [sports; "baseball"]

New Record/Request

Set Field [sports; "soccer"]

Set Field [city; "Austin"]

Perform Find []

This will give you all the records for ALL your criteria. To do finds for individual critera just run seperate finds and you can always run summary reports grouped by people as well.

Edited March 14, 2007 by Guest

[sunbird]

Ok, I'll try that - thanks!