Hello, I have a table with numerical values. I want to color the high values so they stand out. I can do this either using the highlighting expert or a formatting formula on the background color. Formulas give much greater flexibility and you can also use the format painter to copy the formula to other fields. Are there any advantages to using the highlighting expert, or is it a redundant feature?

I also formatted the numbers to "Suppress if Zero" so that the non-zero cells stand out. Unfortunately this causes all formatting to be suppressed - borders, background color etc. This puts ugly white blanks in my nice colorful table. Is there a way to suppress zeros and retain formatting? The only thing I can think of is to use the highlighting expert or formatting formula to make the font color the same as the background if zero.

Thanks.

Thanks. Yes it occurred to me that highlighting expert can do several things at once. Unfortunately it can only compare one field/formula to one static value. For example you can't highlight a field if it is greater than another field value, unless you write a formula to do it, in which case you may as well use a formatting formula.

Usually I only change one part of the formatting - the font color or background color, so using one formatting formula is no big deal.

It would be nice if formulas could reference attributes of a field directly and update several at once, instead of having a different formula for each. Something like this:

If CurrrentFieldValue > {Table.MaxValue} (
   CurrrentFieldValue.fontstyle = crBold;
   CurrrentFieldValue.fontcolor = RGB(255,128,128);
   CurrrentFieldValue.backcolor = crSilver;
   // etc
)

But I'm dreaming, I guess I've been programming too long in MS Access ...