Meetings: FileMaker Pro 12 Starter Solution

The Meetings Starter Solution is a great way to organize your business meetings. It's one of the 16 pre-made templates that's available for you to start using for your database requirements. It's fully unlocked so you can view and modify the database tables, relationships, layouts, and scripts.

When you start out FileMaker Pro 12, just click File > New From Starter Solution… and select Meetings. Type the name you want for the database (in case you'll have multiple of the same database), specify where you want to save it, and click Choose.

You'll be presented a new record where you can begin typing in the meeting details, such as Title, Location, Dates and Times. The meeting duration is automatically calculated for. you. There are two tabs on the right part of the screen where you can list each meeting topic and action item based on subject. You can see meetings that are related to the current one for quick reference, and a meeting report can be quickly generated and emailed to the participants afterwards.

The Action Items tab lets you track to-dos for specific topics.

You can click the Repeat Meeting button to copy over the meeting information to a new record.

The Meeting Report displays a printable all-in-one summary of the record details.

Clicking the Meeting List button shows you a list of all meetings you've created, with an option to sort it by Time Frame, Date, Location, Title or Recurring. There's an option to filter the meeting list by Today, Upcoming, or Past. You can also import and export item records to any of the file formats supported by FileMaker Pro, and print out all the records you're viewing.

The Meeting List screen.

Aside from the professionally designed templates that look great on the desktop version of FileMaker Pro 12 (for Macintosh or Windows), additional layouts for FileMaker Go 12 for iOS and built-in scripts in the Starter Solution automatically show the best layout based on your mobile device (either iPad or iPhone/iPod Touch). Here's what the iPad layout looks like:

The iPad List View.

The iPad Detail view.

The Action Items screen.

You can work with this starter solution in your iOS device in several ways:

• You can sync it with your iPad or iPhone/iPod Touch using iTunes.
• You can email the file to your iOS device and open it with FileMaker Go 12.
• You can enable FileMaker Network Sharing in FileMaker Pro 12, and open the file remotely using FileMaker Go 12.

Enjoy!