Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Creating fields with the Field Picker is quick and easy.
1.
Click the button labeled New Field
.
A field—labeled Field—appears in the list.
2.
Type
First Name
and then press Enter
.
The field's name is accepted.
Repeat the process to create the Last Name and Rental Fee fields. Click the + sign to accept a
new field name and create another new field. See the box below for more information on
how to decide which fields your database needs.
UP TO SPEED: A FIELD = INDIVIDUALLY SIGNIFICANT DATA
Your database tracks lease documents, and its fields will include all the important attributes about
those documents. How do you decide which fields to create?
For example, you may create a single Name field to hold lease signers' first and last names—but
you'd be making a mistake. What if you need to sort your data by last name? If you've entered
names the way you might type them in a word processor (first name and then last name), you'd only
be able to sort by the person's first name.
It's usually a bad move to have different kinds of information in the same field. Instead, think about
what elements—no matter how small—are important to how you'll search, sort, analyze, and other-
wise access your records later. In database lingo, those bits of information are
individually signific-
ant
, and each one should get its own field.
For example, a U.S. address often contains several pieces of information: street name, optional suite
number, city, state, and Zip code. If you stored all that data in one field, you'd have a hard time
searching for all the people in Washington state. Your search results would include records with
streets or cities called Washington. So when you're deciding which fields you need, ask yourself:
“Which bits of my data are
individually significant
?”
It's usually not necessary to split off a suite number from a street address field, but it's usually best
to split off the city, state, and Zip code. It's a rare case, but if you have a compelling reason to split
off a bit of data (say you have to do targeted mailings to people with street numbers ranging from
1000 to 1500), then it may make sense for you to split street addresses into two or even more fields.
Managing Field Types
People's names are considered text, because they're made up of alphabetical characters.
When you created fields using the simple technique in the previous section, you didn't have
to do anything special to create a field that's ideal for storing text. FileMaker automatically
