From the course: FileMaker Pro Essential Training

Exporting data from FileMaker - FileMaker Pro Tutorial

From the course: FileMaker Pro Essential Training

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Exporting data from FileMaker

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- [Instructor] So FileMaker has a ton of really sophisticated ways that you can share data that's inside your custom app with other non FileMaker data applications. For example, you can host it a non FileMaker server, treated as a web service and people can connect to your data through the FileMaker data API. You can host it on FileMaker server and have another application connect to it through to ODBC connection. You can even have other FileMaker files connect to your FileMaker file persistently and share data between them. But let's say sometimes you just want to dump some data out of your database and have it imported into another system. Specifically if you don't have one of those options I just mentioned available. Say for example, somebody wants to get all of my customer records out so they can import it into some mail campaign, that they're doing in another application. So in that case, I would open up my FileMaker file and I'd have a couple decisions to make. First of all I have to go to a layout that's based on the table, that has the data that I want to export. So in my example, I mentioned I want to export customer data for a mail campaign. So I'm going to go to a layout that's based on the customer table. You see here, that's our table called the customers. The next decision I have to decide is do I want to export all of the records in my database or just some of them, and if I want to just do some of them what might that criteria be? Well, you see here that I've got 1523 records I can tell that because in the upper left-hand corner, you see it says 1523 total. That means that, that's how many records are stored in my customer table. Let's say I don't want to export all of those records, I just want to export the records from California. So in that case, I would go into find mode, I would put in whatever criteria would help me narrow down those records and I see that I get 24 records, so out of all the 1523 records only 24 of them are from the State of California. If I wanted to export all 1523, I could just do show all but in this case, let's say we're just going to export the 24 of them. So now that I've determined what table I'm going to export from and the subset of data that I'm going to export, I'll go under the file menu and choose the export records option. So here I've got some other decisions to make what do I want to name my export? I'll just call it ExportTest and then where I want to save it, I'll just save it to the desktop, I'll check automatically open the file if it's not already checked and then I can choose from the different types. So currently in the FileMaker 18 platform, I can export it as a Tab or Comma-Separated Value file, or I can create another file in the form of DBF, a Merge, I can create an HTML Table with my exported data, or I can create a new FileMaker Pro File that contains all the data that I'm exporting and that same is true for XML and in this case I'm going to choose an Excel Workbook that way we can preview it in Excel to see what our export looks like. So I'm going to hit save and because I chose Excel, I have some other options that are specific to an Excel spreadsheet I don't have to put any of those in right now, I'll just advance on to the specify order for export window. You're going to see this no matter what format you choose. So in this case, we're going to want to choose some fields to export. So to specify field order for export windows what you'll see no matter which format you choose. So in this case, what you want to do is pick just the fields that you want to export, if you want to move all of the fields just hit move all and you'll notice that some container fields cannot be exported, so it's going to move all my fields except for my logo container. I can also clear all those out and then just manually pick the ones we want. So for example, I'm doing a mail campaign, so I really just need company name, first name, last name and email. Now, I can change the order in which all these appear if I'd like to, by just simply moving the handles that's going to just give me the order from left to right in which the columns are going to appear on my exported file. So once I've picked the fields that I want, I can hit export and because I chose to have it open up in the native application for previewing, it's automatically opened up my exported file inside Excel and I can see that I've got the first name, last name, email and company name fields all exported in this case in Excel. So if you have other individuals or applications that need to consume your FileMaker data, you can export and you can export as many times as you like choosing any of the file formats available, without any risk of changing or deleting the data in your original file.

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