Button Bar Techniques!
By David J. Weiner
Button bars, for me, are the single most useful new feature introduced in FileMaker 14 (aside from the Script Workspace, which is a beautiful thing). Interestingly, the reason I find them so useful has nothing to do with their primary intended use case: the navigation bar. Sure, a simple and neatly-aligned navbar is great to have, and being able to switch segments from a regular button to a popover and back again is truly useful for speed of UI design, but the killer feature of button bars is the calculated label. This feature alone is, as they say, worth the price of admission. It means that you can display output from FileMaker’s calculation engine right at the user interface level, which, prior to FileMaker 14, was not available without creating a calculated field or resorting to script or Let statement variable tricks.