A New Tool Palette

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 minutes

Many years ago I developed a floating palette that would appear when you previewed a report to be printed. This was back in the days of FileMaker 4 or 5 when the alternative was to show the Status Area down the left side of the window. Back in those days the Status Area, when you were in Preview mode, only allowed you to control the zoom, which page you were looking at and a built-in Continue and Cancel button. I developed the floating palette so there was a user-friendly interface to direct the user how to continue: print, cancel, zoom, scroll, next page, last page, how many pages – it was a lot of information packed into a small space.

The old palette had some drawbacks though. On smaller screens the user spent a lot of time scrolling to see the whole page – that’s to be expected on a small screen but the palette took control away from the previewed window and put it into the palette’s buttons which wasn’t always intuitive to users who were used to scroll bars.

Since those days, FileMaker has added built-in support for saving to PDF and Excel and added those buttons as well as Print and Page Setup to the new Status Toolbar. As a result, recent systems don’t get the old palette. Instead they get the new, improved, built-in toolbar on a floating preview window.