When editing a layout you can soon have so many different buttons, fields or text etc that it can be hard to find something when you want to make a mass change, for example change the font of all fields.

Well you can press Control + Shift + A (Command + Option + A on Mac) to select all similar layout objects, so you select any one field, press the hotkey and then all the fields on the layout will be selected for you to easily make any change to them all you want.

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Have you ever wanted some layout items to be vertical or upside down?  All you have to do is add the text, field, button etc as normal and then select Rotate from the Arrange menu, or from the right click context menu of the layout item and it will be switch between the available rotations.

When designing a layout in FileMaker you quite often want an object to look exactly the same as another, for example when laying out lots of fields.  You could use the Duplicate menu command in the edit menu, or the keyboard shortcut for that, Ctrl + D / Command + D.

Another, even easier way is to just hold down the Control key on PC (or Option key on a Mac) whilst dragging the layout object you want to duplicate and a ‘+’ sign will appear next to the pointer to show that you are duplicating the control and not just moving the original, which it would do if you weren’t holding down control/option the whole time you are dragging the control.

If you do accidently let go of the modifier key before you finish dragging and then end up moving the original control instead of duplicating it, you can easily reverse the change by using the Undo command in the Edit menu, or use the keyboard shortcut Control + Z (Command + Z on Mac)

When in layout mode if you find yourself repeatedly adding fields for example and changing the formatting each time, you’ll be happy to know you can make each new item the same!

To change the new layout object defaults you just have to Ctrl+Click (Command+Click on Mac) on the field you want to copy the settings and formatting for to the defaults.  Now all newly created items will be exactly the same.