FileMaker Question

I don't believe so.

 

Do you mean that, let's say you have a table of Students that you teach, where each record is a different student {John Jones, Cindy Reynolds, Virginia Smith, etc}, and you want to be able to enter just once into a field some value, let's say the name of today's exam {"Exam of 6.20.06"} and then have a calculation field calculate a value for each record based in part on that one value — e.g., "John Jones | Exam of 6.20.06" for John Jones, "Cindy Reynolds | Exam of 6.20.06" for Cindy Reynolds, etc. ...?

Yes, the first field is set to be stored as a GLOBAL value (see the Storage tab in field defs). The second field would be a calc field that references that global field as one of its parameters.

 

I should add that you can also have the calculation exist as a global value — Let's say you want a calculation based on the exam name and the professor's name (your name) and those things are identical at the moment for all occurrences of your students and their taking of the exam. Both the text globals (for your name and exam name) and the calc field (which concatenates the two) are stored as global values, one value per the table instead of one per record.