How to ensure that FMP 10 properly displays value lists from other tables

Sweet victory!

After struggling for a week with the same problem, I have a solution (recorded here for the aeons, of course).

Challenge: To get a drop-down menu, populated by a value list populated by a field in a related table, to display *all* the records' data in that field, not just the first record's. Apparently you can't use a calculation field (which I was trying to do) if you want to do this.

In my case, after the user enters a first name, last name, suffice, and honorific, I want to have a field calculate the complete name and title of the given person. Then I want this info to appear in a drop-down menu elsewhere.

What threw me off is that calculation fields don't seem to work properly, on account of not being directly editable. The workaround I finally used is to set the field for the calculated value to a Text field (not calculation) and then tell it to insert calculated data automatically.

I'm not sure that I've got all the bugs worked out yet. Nevertheless, it feels good to get this far!

Update: To prevent the field from being modifiable by hand (as opposed to calculation), just select the option to prevent modification during data entry.

Fixed MS Office on Mac!

Well, that was a royal pain!

I've had MS Office 2008, which worked fine except for Excel. "Not enough memory" every time it tried to start up. No macros to blame.

Went round and round with our (very helpful!) IT crew, to no avail. We tried:

• Uninstall MS Office 2008 and install 2011—Now everything crashed!
• Revert to 2008—Again, no Excel.
• Re-install just Excel 2008—It worked, albeit with a different error message that still allowed me to use the program.

Then MS Word stopped working. Remember that old joke? "MS Works doesn't." Word up!

Anyway, I got tired of not being able to do my work, so I tried troubleshooting on my own. Long story short, I wiped out 2008, reinstalled 2011, and booted the computer (not Word) in Safe Mode.

It worked!

I checked my extensions, and lo and behold! Only one thing was checked at startup: iTunesHelper.

I unchecked it.

Now Office works just fine. I really don't care all that much about iTunes, so we're good! (What is iTunesHelper anyway? Is it anything like HamburgerHelper?)