You may want to place fields on a data-entry form quite differently from the way you want them to print on reports. Your print layout should get rid of buttons, organizational boxes, field shading, on-screen instructions or hints, and perhaps even field labels. Second, data-input layouts usually have a variety of user-interface elements that you don’t want to reproduce on your printed output. So, to make it all work efficiently, make your data-input layouts wide, but build your print layouts tall. You could simply design your data-input layouts to fit those dimensions, but that wastes a lot of horizontal space on screen. There are many reasons for this, and understanding them will help you design better print layouts.įor starters, computer screens are almost always wider than they are tall, but most users want printed reports in portrait orientation, that is, a regulation 8.5-by-11-inch document in the traditional upright position. If your FileMaker database is going to be used to print reports of any kind, you should create special layouts designed exclusively for printing. (Using Bento instead? We’ll cover Bento in a separate article.)
Here are a few tips that will help you design attractive and useful printed reports in FileMaker Pro. But it’s more challenging to figure out how to create useable printed reports.
It’s always been easy to create a straightforward database in FileMaker Pro, and with the enhancements in FileMaker Pro 11, even a newbie can start entering data immediately.
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