Undoing "Replace Field Contents"?

[Wickerman]

I have a friend who finds Excel much easier to use than Filemaker and I enjoy taunting him from time to time.

One thing he insists makes Filemaker inferior is that he can very easily enter common values across a large number of records by simply cutting & pasting. When I counter with "Replace Field Contents" as an equally convenient capability, he points out that you can't "Undo" this act in Filemaker, while you can in Excel.

My response is . . . Well, you should BE CAREFUL!

But then it occurred to me there might be some clever technique people embed in their solutions to allow a reversal of an ill-conceived "Replace" action. Anyone come up with a workaround?

It does seem a desirable feature - - might FMP add this someday?

[bcooney]

Just, revert to backup. Sorry. Unlike Excel, FM saves the file.

[Vaughan]

... he points out that you can't "Undo" this act in Filemaker, while you can in Excel.

He is indeed correct. However Excel is a single-user document while FileMaker databases are shared, multi-user documents. Very different beasts. Excel (and the user) doesn't have the consideration that data could be changed at any time *by somebody else using the document*.

An un-do for something like replace cannot ever be added. Consider this scenario: a table with a enough records that the replace command takes some time to complete. While your replace is running, the first record has been changed but somebody then edits the data in this record to something else. Your replace cannot be undone any more because the "original" replaced data is lost lost. Undoing it anyway could lead to some mighty bad data inconsistencies.

The Replace is not really *one* single event: it is a separate event for every record in the found set.

[Wickerman]

Thanks for the clarifications / insights fellas!