Saving as PDF or Excel

- [Instructor] In addition to being able to print any layout that you can see in FileMaker, FileMaker also has built-in functionality to be able to generate Microsoft Excel or PDF files that represent the layout that you're looking at as well. You can see these options when you go into preview mode. See the icon up here for save as Excel? I can either choose to print this or let's try save as Excel. So I'm going to save to the desktop and I'll give FileMaker some instructions like the number of records being browsed rather than just the current record.

And I'll hit save. So if we open up that file, we see that it contains all of the records that were in the found set when we generated this Excel document and it creates just the three columns that we see here. They're the same three columns that were available in the FileMaker database. The idea is to mimic what you're seeing in the FileMaker database but in the format of an Excel file. Keep in mind that we can also export records as Excel. We can choose Excel as the export option, and in this case, we're not beholden to just the three columns that appear on the layout, we can pick any one of the columns and create our own customized export.

But if what we intend to do is create an Excel version of the layout that we're looking at on screen, we can do that through save as Excel. You notice that we also have the option for saving as PDF. In this case, we can save the PDF document, let's say to the desktop. We can also choose records to be browsed or current record and you'll notice that save as PDF has a third option: blank record. Sometimes maybe you have an input layout that you've created and you can create a blank version of that which is a form that users can fill out by hand if you want. That's what that option is there for. You see we have some other options too because we've chosen PDF like adding document title, subject author, keywords, even a password if you'd like to, initial view, page layout, magnification.

These are all things that you're used to when you're generating PDFs in other applications. We say save and now we see that we have all of the records in our found set which happens to be just over one page worth of records, saved as PDF and in this case I'm viewing them in preview. These are both really great tools for FileMaker for sharing information on the fly either saving as Excel or PDF which are providing options as alternatives to generating documents through the print option.