Get going with Starter Solutions

- [Voiceover] The purpose of this course is to show you how to create robust FileMaker custom apps from scratch. Before I show you that, which we're gonna get into and we're gonna spend a lot of time doing, I want to show you a quick and easy way that you can create a FileMaker solution that's already done and ready for your data. These are what are called starter solutions. I'm a big fan of starter solutions as a trainer as well. The way that you get to starter solutions is by going under the File menu in FileMaker and choosing Get Started. You'll see the new FileMaker Get Started screen that ships with FileMaker 15, and you'll see that you can choose a starter solution, create a custom solution, or even learn more information.

So we'll take a look at these starter solutions. There are some new starter solutions that are created just for the FileMaker 15 platform. They are the contacts starter solution, the inventory starter solution, content management, and even tasks. If you're familiar with previous versions of FileMaker, these may look familiar to you, but as you'll see when you click on one of these, like let's say for example, Inventory, this'll create a new starter solution, but these aren't as complex as some of the other starter solutions that used to ship with the platform.

Instead, they're very easy to understand. When you go under the hood, you can see that you've got either one or just a couple of different tables. There are some fields to find for you already, but nothing too complex. You might even have a relationship set up. In this case, this is the only starter solution that has a relationship between the tabs, but most of them just contain single tables. But it's a great way to get started because you already have all your layouts created for you, I've got a list view for Inventory, I can start adding my data in here already if I want to, I've got the product's detail as well.

I can start adding data here if I want. And you'll notice that we have layouts that are especially created not just for desktop, but for tablet as well, so the detail version of the product layout that we're looking at now is actually specific to being deployed on tablets, or iPads, for example. Also there's phone layouts. You can see the dramatic difference in these layouts when you go into Layout mode. So here, if we start at the beginning, we can see that we've got the desktop list, desktop details, iPad list, iPad details, phone list, and phone details, all optimized and ready for you to go.

There's a couple scripts in here too to help you understand how scripts work, and that's why, as a trainer, I like these. I like for people to get FileMaker in their hands, see an example of how it works, but not be to overwhelmed by it. These are some really simple scripts, and you can get started with understanding scripts by just taking a look at them. If you want to just start working with this database, you can start creating data. You can type right into these fields if you want to, and add your own information.

Or you can go under the File, Import Records, and point to a spreadsheet that might already contain some inventory data, for example, and pull all your data into this application. This way you can get up and running with FileMaker very easily. A lot of times customers come to us and they ask us, hey, do you have an inventory solution or a task management solution, or whatever, and we just point them to these things because they're already built and they're already doing most of what they want. And the best part is, they're completely wide open so you can go in and make changes, add fields, change layouts, do everything that we're gonna learn about in this course, but to a file that's already been started for you, which is where we get the name Starter Solution.

But if you look back on this window, you'll see that we not only have the options to use these basic starter solutions, but we also still have the advanced starter solutions. So we have 16 different complex starter solutions, much like the ones that we just looked at, but some of these are actually quite complex. For example, if we look at the event management solution, I'll save this to the Desktop, you can use this to manage any event or multiple events. It's got all sorts of layouts already created in here, just like the phones and tablets and the desktop ones that we looked at, but these are a little bit more sophisticated.

They've got a lot of relationships in here, a lot more tables, a lot more fields, and frankly, they also have things like reports that you can generate, imports and exports already built in, multiple different tables of data. There's a lot to learn from here, but more importantly, there's a lot that you can use to just get started by putting your data into the complex starter solutions to get going. And the interesting thing is, if you're using a 30 day trial of FileMaker, anything that you create or any starter solutions you create or modify, they don't expire after the 30 days. All you have to do is just buy yourself a licensed version of FileMaker, and anything you created during that 30 day trial, or any of the starter solutions that you created or added data to will still be available to you after that trial period.

So starter solutions are a great way to get familiar with FileMaker without having to do any programming at all. So I encourage you to at least take a look at a couple of these different ones to see if any of them suit you, or at least to get familiar with some of the concepts that we're about to talk about later on in this course.