QuickFind Coolness

by Matt Petrowsky

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You hear the announcement about FileMaker 11 and you make a quick scan of the new features. You decide to investigate them as best you can, (because you have real work that needs to be done) and you tell yourself "I'll look into them later."

Time passes and you've yet to use a few of those new features. This is my story with QuickFind. I've long created my own version of QuickFind with a scripted process which takes input from a global field and executes a search across multiple fields - even creating multi-query searches. No big deal.

In fact, there's still a reason to do that, if you want to build upon a previous search. QuickFind does not store the last find such that Modify Last Find script step will pull up the criteria.

However, recently, I hacked up a quick file and needed to do some quick and dirty searching. It turns out that doing so is a dream with QuickFind. You don't even need the actual fields on a layout. You can use text labels, which hide themselves with conditional formatting, in order to supply QuickFind with the proper search fields. Turn the fields you don't want off with a checkbox (FileMaker sillily assumes you want to search all fields known to your database).

Throw a global text field on your layout, add a constrain here, an extend there and adding the feature to any FileMaker 11+ database is a no brainer. Just do it, it's way too easy. If you need more of the details then watching this video will certainly help you out!