Hi, I'm using an excel spredsheet right now but I'm thinking of switchingto a filemaker db. I have a chart of widths across the top and lengths going down. The info is generated via several calculations. Generally there are some rows that are all zeros. So what I have to do is go through and delete the rows and move all the data up manualy which is a pain and allows for some unfortunate mistakes. What I want is to have a calculation that says, if row is zeros, then don't display the row !and! move the list of rows up. I feel there is probably a way to do this in filemaker but my brain is really strikeing out on this one.

What I could do is import and export and import back and forth but that seems crazy since I'm alreading exporting from a third product to excel.

Is there some way to use a spreadsheet in filemaker or is there another program that would acomplish all this better?

Thanks,

Raif Harik

Raif,

If I understand your problem correctly, you are looking to get rid of all those records where 0's are opresent in all fields.

In FM you would be able to remove these records easily. If you created a caculation field, called Record Total, that added up the values of the fields, you could then conduct a Find for all those records where the Record Total was equal to 0. Once found, you could then delete all the found records and voila. This operation, the find and delete could then be scripted to a button so that the operation was done at a click of your mouse.

Hope this helps.

Thanks Birdman,

Actually, this is not really what I need. Upon much contemplation I have realized exactly what I need. You see what I have is a db which has a bunch of records with values based on some calculation. some of those are zero. I then have an other db which has a portal and shows those records. I just have a match field that filters out the zero's however, since there are like 25 options and perhaps only 6 will be positive, I have to have 25 rows in the portal in order to see them all at once if per chance I have 25 positives. I could use scrolls but I understand that they wont print if not showing. What I have done which has solved my problem is to do a slideprint and view in preview mode. This works except it's not editable. Anyway, sorry to be long winded but what I think would be great would be the ability to do a slide or better yet a 'reduce size of enclosing part' in browse so it would show all the records in a portal but not the empty space. Thanks for responding

Raif