Easiest Conditional Formatting Trick Ever

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 4 minutes

Have you ever clicked in a field in your database, were interrupted by a phone call and returned to your database and forgot where you were or what you were doing? Wouldn’t it be cool if FileMaker could highlight the field you’re in so you can see what you were changing?

If this problem sounds familiar here’s a cool trick for you and it’s super easy. Conditional formatting in FileMaker Pro has been with us since version 9 and it allows you to change the font, font size, text colour and a bunch of other options about a text element, button or field. One if its properties is that the conditional formatting of a field can be overridden by the field’s properties as defined in Layout mode when the field is active. For example, if you define a field to show black text on a white fill in layout mode, but use conditional formatting to make it white text on a black fill, when you click into that field it will revert to black text on a white fill. Once you click out of the field, it will go back to white text on a black fill.

You can use this property to your advantage if you want to highlight the active field. Simply define all your fields to the formatting you want to indicate your active field with like black, bold text on a yellow fill. Then set conditional formatting for all your fields to change the display to the “normal” appearance of your fields such as black text on a white fill.

Fig. 1 – fields formatted with yellow fill in layout mode

Fig. 2 – during data entry, conditional formatting keeps the non-active fields white and the active field has its default yellow fill

Fig. 3 – no fields are active, only conditional formatting applies

This gives the illusion that there must be some kind of special function to make the active field appear highlighted but in fact we’re using the native behaviour of conditional formatting to our advantage along with a very simple formatting calculation. The conditional formatting calculation is simply “1” so the formatting will always be applied.