Tooltips

Training people, either when you first launch a new database, or when new employees come into your workforce, is a big part of making your database successful. You can have beautiful layouts, bulletproof privilege sets and complex, well-thought-out scripts, but if folks don't know how and when to use them, they'll miss out on the benefits. To spare you the wrath of confused (or worse, frustrated) users, FileMaker Advanced has a feature called tooltips. Like the onscreen labels that pop up in Windows and many other programs, tooltips can help guide people through the features you've created for them, maybe even cut down on training time.

You can attach tooltips to any object, or group of objects, that you can select on a layout: fields, text, or graphics. Tooltips are visible in FileMaker Pro Advanced, FileMaker Pro, runtimes (Section 19.7.1.2), and on databases that use Instant Web Publishing. You can create, edit, or delete tooltips only with FileMaker Pro Advanced.

To create a tooltip, go to Layout mode and choose the object you want to have a tooltip. Then choose Format Set Tooltip. Create your tooltip, and then click OK. Now people see the tooltip when the mouse hovers over the object in Browse Mode. Just like tooltips in other applications, the tooltip doesnt appear immediately, so as not to inconvenience more advanced users.

The tooltip for a report button could give users the name of the report that the button runs. Or you could make field labels into tooltips, and let people know about the format the field needs. But the Set Tooltip dialog box gives you the power of calculations, so you might as well make full use of them. Using the GetNthRecord () function, you could put a tooltip on a button that takes your users to the next record. But before they click, the tooltip shows content from the next record. Now your users don't need to go to the next record to see if it's the one they want. See Figure 19-9 to see this calculation and tooltip in action.