Again I ran into a situation with a client the other day that would like to have different column heading labels when their records were exported to an Microsoft Excel file. When Filemaker Pro exports the column headings it of course exports the field names as they are defined into the database definition. I submitted to FileMaker, Inc some time ago a request to add an alternate field name when the database fields are created. Microsoft Access has had this for years, which I believe they call caption. The purpose this serves it is gives a human readable label to an otherwise unclear database label. To the developer of the system a field called ‘sompid” may be very clear but ‘school of medicine patient identification’ makes it much easier for any person to understand what the field is referring to.
If you are like me I don’t like using any spaces or any characters such as %, -, !, $, etc. This process works well again for developers but not the end users.
Field Examples / Human Readable Label
__kp_Student /Student ID
NameFL / Full Name
AddressCity / City
PhoneH / Home Phone
You get the idea.
Granted the example of the ‘sompid’ had a much too long ‘human readable label’ but hopefully you understand the point. It would be nice to have the caption/alternate label added when you add new fields to a layout and also when you export your data say to MS Excel. Something that we would love to see.