Category Archives: Function of the Week

Scanning the growing list of functions of the week, I noticed a lack of date and time functions. Dealing with temporal matters isn’t always easy. If time were a base-ten system with, say, ten hours in a day and a hundred … Continue reading →

After a brief hiatus, the Function of the Week is back and just as ordinary, normal, typical, standard and regular as ever! Why so mundane? Because we’re picking apart the Average function this week and we’ve caught the Average Spirit! Average … Continue reading →

The past few posts have covered an array of text parsing functions. There are countless scenarios where you may need to manipulate text in FileMaker, but the two I most often encounter are data migration and data grooming. I don’t know … Continue reading →

Having previously ruminated on the Left, Right and Middle functions, then the LeftWords, RightWords, and MiddleWords functions, we’re going to wrap up with a third triad of functions, namely LeftValues, RightValues, and MiddleValues. Before we dig into the functions though, a definition … Continue reading →

Last week we looked at the Left, Right, and Middle text parsing functions. These are extremely useful when you need to parse out highly regular data like, say, a telephone number where you can count on the first three characters to be … Continue reading →

Text parsing pops up a lot when migrating data from an old system to a new one, or even when you realize that your data just needs some grooming. Whatever the impetus, Left, Right, and Middle are the cornerstones of … Continue reading →

Sign is a nice example of a compact, efficient function that can really cut down the length of certain calculations. Its utility is simply this: check a number and report whether it’s negative, zero, or positive. Sign accepts just one parameter … Continue reading →

If there’s a theme, or worse, a monotonous repetition to my descriptions of FileMaker’s many functions, it’s probably the bit where I say “this function isn’t complicated, but you can do cool stuff with it.” While I could possibly try … Continue reading →

In FileMaker the current record, that is the record you’re currently viewing at any given moment, is the center of the universe. Very nearly everything you can see or derive is in that record or somehow related to it. This is … Continue reading →

Finding a happy place in text formatting isn’t always as simple as you might think. Sure, plain, black on white text gets dull, but we’ve all seen embellishments get out of hand when somebody combines bold, underline, and strikethrough. But … Continue reading →