Database Reference
In-Depth Information
fornia, it shows
1
. If California accounted for only five percent of your sales, on the other
hand, it says
.05
.
The Subtotaled checkbox that comes along with this option is also a little confusing. When
you turn it on, FileMaker lets you pick another field from a list called “When sorted by.” The
name of this list serves to inform you that you have to
sort
the record by the selected field for
this summary field to work. If you don't sort the records yourself before you view the report,
then the field stays empty.
WARNING
That problem is not as big as it may seem at first. As you learned on
Creating a Trailing Group Re-
FileMaker looks at the selected field, figures out which records have the
same
value in them
as in the current record, and calculates the fraction based only on the total of
those
records.
In
Figure 15-3
, the “Percent of Total” field is a normal
Fraction of Total of
field, while the
“Percent of Region” field uses
Fraction of Total of
sub-totaled by Region.
List of
Technically, generating a list of values doesn't really summarize anything, but lists of field
values can be useful when wrangling data, so FileMaker gives you the option.
List of
does
exactly what it says: for every record in the summarized group it displays the value in the se-
lected field. It correctly reflects sort order but ignores blank values, so you'll never see blank
lines in the summary field. It does show duplicate values, however. For example, if you have
150 records all with the word “wonky” in the field being summarized,
List of
will present
you with 150 lines of “wonky” in one summary field.
Summarizing Repetitions
When you summarize a repeating field, you have another choice to make. Do you want
one
summary value that aggregates every repetition, producing a single value? If so, then choose
“All together.” If you want a repeating summary value that aggregates each repetition indi-
vidually instead, then choose Individually.
