Sue, it should work fine with a tab.

Trying to figure spaces without using a monospaced font is a recipe for admittance into the local mental health facility of your choice.

You need to put the tab in your calculation, of course, but sometimes it is hard to get one into a calculation. The easiest and most reliable way I have found is to just use char ( 9 ) to get a tab where I want it. You can make it a custom function and use that function in your calc. You can even just name it "tab."

The second thing you need to do (and is probably the one you are missing) is to set the tab "stops" where you want your columns to be. If you have a version of FileMaker that has inspectors (10 and 11) it is at the bottom of the Appearance tab.

If you have an earlier version it is buried deep in the Format->Text menu (IIRC), and you are totally forgiven for not being able to find it.

Enjoy!

j.

On Aug 31, 2011, at 12:19 PM, Sue wrote:

> Does anyone know a way to include a tab in a concatenated text calculation?
> 
> I have several situations where it would be nice to have a field of text that includes tabs so that the beginning letter of various parts of the calculated field line up.  E.g.  I have a field that returns a name and a birthday.  I would like the name and birthday values to be separated by a tab instead of a set number of spaces so that I could use the List function to give me an output that looks like:
> 
> Joe Smith        January 1
> Sarah Johnson    January 20
> 
> instead of
> 
> Joe Smith        January 1
> Sarah Johnson        January 20
> 
> I tried creating a calculation looking at length of the name and returning a variable number of spaces which I then included in the calculation--eg Name & Tabcalc & birthday, but that didn't work quite right--maybe due to the different kerning for different letters (eg an i perhaps uses less space than m)?
> 
> That leaves me out of ideas.  Maybe it isn't possible, but if it is, I would like to know how to do it.
> 
> Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
> 
> Sue



--
Jonathan Fletcher
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Fletcher Data Consulting
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