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Once your FileMaker database is adequately planned and you have know just what fields and tables you need to put the database together, it is time to open the FileMaker application and get to work. (The screenshot on the left illustrates the opening dialog box of FileMaker.)
Next, open FileMaker and name your new database. By default, Filemaker saves an empty table with the same title as your database. Our next step will be to design the fields that will go into our basic table. We can begin designing our fields on the Fields tab by naming the field, giving it a field type and assigning special attributes and behaviors to the field in the Options… dialogs.
Once the field is named and the Type is selected, the Options… button is active. In our screenshot example we have named a new text field Salesman. We opened the Options dialog box, selected the Validation tab and in the Require: section, we have selected the Not empty box so that the field is always filled in. We have checked the box next to Display custom message if validation fails and filled in an appropriate message. For our example field, we have also opted to attach a user-specified list of sales people to help us fill in the names of our sales staff as we enter data. The screenshot below displays options in the Validation tab to create our list.
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