September 25, 201411 yr Newbies Less than a year ago I created a revenue table to keep track of projects and revenue. It mirrors the way our financial officer likes to view excel sheets. So this is essentially a flat, non-relational aspect of our database that the FO can export to excel and chart things the way he is used to. The caveat here is that I have to keep creating fields for every month and altering a calculation for every field. <figure 1> | ProjName | FY14_Sep | FY14_Oct | FY14_Nov ...| ProjA | $x | $y | $z| ProjB | $x | $y | $z However, I understand that the proper way to set this up is to have a table for Projects with a one-to-many related table for Revenue. So my new related revenue table looks like this: <figure 2> |::ProjName| Date | $$$ || ProjA | FY14Sep | $x || ProjA | FY14Oct | $y || ProjA | FY14Nov | $z || ProjB | FY14Sep | $x || ProjB | FY14Oct | $y || ProjB | FY14Nov | $z | So while this is all very neat and proper within FileMaker, exporting this table to excel yields a vastly different display of data. I must come up with some solution to convert my revenue table data <figure 2> into calculation fields in <figure 1>. GetNthRecord was suggested, but in place of record number argument I need to filter by month and year... and filemaker doesn't seem to allow a calculation there.
September 25, 201411 yr You definitely do not want calculation fields for this. Most of this data can be pre-aggregated into static data to make this report fast. What you need is a new reporting table that looks like your figure 1 and collect aggregated data from your real table to display as per figure 1.
September 25, 201411 yr So this is essentially a flat, non-relational aspect of our database that the FO can export to excel and chart things the way he is used to. I am having trouble understanding what is the real problem here. Do you want to implement this "flat, non-relational aspect" in Filemaker - or do you want to export your data in a flat, non-relational tabular structure to Excel? The former task is NOT a prerequisite for the latter.
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