Chapter 5. Finding and Sorting Records

Finding and sorting records are like two halves of the same process. Together, they give you the power to spotlight particular records in a particular order. That ability allows you to complete such mundane work as correcting entry errors as well as big-picture tasks like analyzing trends.

With Find you can hunt down a record that needs changing without having to go through the records one by one. While records normally are displayed in the order they were created, the Sort command lets you arrange the view to what best suits your needs. The new contextual sort feature, explained on page 67, makes sorting much easier to use.

Finding related field information in relational databases is covered in Creating Relational Databases on page 125.

Download the example database used in this section, home prices.fp7, at: http://waywest.net/filemaker/. (All FileMaker 8 files end with .fp7the same suffix used by FileMaker 7.)