This page is for all of the other "stuff" that we though you might be interested in: Saving Your Report and How We Launched This Help System From FileMaker.

Saving Your Report:
Once you've viewed your report, you can save it to disk for archiving purposes, email your report to someone else, or even edit your report in Excel. To save your report, perform the following steps:

• Create a new query or choose an existing query

• Execute the query using the "run query" button ()

• Choose "Save As" from the "File" menu in your browser:

  • Internet Explorer - on the PC select "Web Page, complete (*.htm, *.html)", on the Mac OS select "Web Archive" from the pop-up menu in the "Save" dialog

  • Netscape Navigator - on all platforms select "Source" (NOT "Text"!) from the pop-up menu in the "Save" dialog

You should save your report with the extension ".htm" or ".html" so that if you email it to someone else - they can view the contents, regardless of the operating system they're using.

How We Launched This Help System From FileMaker:
FileMaker Pro 5.5 (and above) has a very useful status function called Status(CurrentFilePath). This calculation function will return the physical path to the current database in the following format:

hardDriveName://directory/directory/filename.fp5

The function will return the path to the file the same, regardless of platform. We stripped off the name of the file using this calculation:

Left(Status( CurrentFilePath), Position( Status(CurrentFilePath), "/", 1, PatternCount(Status(CurrentFilePath), "/")))

We appended the subdirectory where this documentation is located (the "documentation" directory), added the name of the current layout (which matches the names of the html files), added the ".htm" extension, and replaced the file://directory with file:///directory (so the browser would know we're using a file off of the local hard drive) and used the "Open URL" script step to open the file. The final calculation is:

Substitute(Left(Status( CurrentFilePath), Position( Status(CurrentFilePath), "/", 1, PatternCount(Status(CurrentFilePath), "/"))), "file://", "file:///") & "documentation/" & Status(CurrentLayoutName) & ".htm"

Pretty cool, huh?