Using the highlighting expert – HP Intelligent Management Center Standard Software Platform User Manual

Page 356

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section conditionally, using the same formula that was used for
suppressing the Page Footer section.

Using the Highlighting Expert

The Highlighting Expert enables you to apply conditional formatting to all
types of report fields (Number, Currency, String, Boolean, Date, Time, and
Date and Time fields). With the expert, you format the selected field either
by specifying a condition based on that field's value, or by specifying a
condition based on the value of a different report field. In other words, the
expert enables you create the following formula: If the value of field X meets
condition A, then apply the specified formatting to the field selected on the
report.

When used for conditional formatting, the Highlighting Expert allows you to:

Modify several attributes at once, without writing a formula.

Highlight all field types used in the report.

Format font style, background color, font color, and border style.

Format a field based on its own values or the values of another field.

Highlight a cross-tab or OLAP cell based on row and column heading
values.

Enter values using your locale-specific number format (such as 1,224.23
for North American users).

Enter dates numerically or textually (January 12, 2001, or Jan 12, 2001).

Undo highlighting quickly.

When you need to conditionally format report fields, the Highlighting Expert
is quicker and easier to use than the Formula Workshop. The Highlighting
Expert is most commonly used to highlight field values that are in some way
distinguished from other values in the report. You might, for example, highlight
your key customers by printing the {Customer.Last Year's Sales} field with
a red background whenever the sales value exceeds $50,000. Alternatively,
to draw attention to outstanding orders, you might bold the {Product.Product
Name} field whenever the {Orders.Shipped} value is False.

The Highlighting Expert, however, is not as flexible as the Formula Workshop.
To use the formatting capabilities of Crystal Reports to their full potential,

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Crystal Reports 2008 SP3 User's Guide

Formatting

13

Working with conditional formatting

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