Gentlemen,

I bought Revelation back in the Cosmos days(Rev F), and developed a application in 1985( I am an end-user). Now Here I am again in 2003 buying OI32 and trying to figure it out What fun!

Here's the question:

How can I get background colors in individual cells in Rlist reports or in Rev Reporter reports.

I have a lot of reports that I would like to categorize, by color, based on the numeric in each cell. I am not trying to color columns but each cell.

I have searched and can't find anything. Do any of you think that a conversion or a calculated field could be the answer??

ANY help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Gordon French, CPA

(by the way, in case you don't know, CPA means "Can't Pass Again")

For the Reporter, you are pretty much out of luck. You can get negative numbers to appear in different colours than positive ones, and make some font changes based on sections and groups, but it's probably not going to be detailed enough for your liking.

For OR_VIEW, you will not be able to do anything for screen based reports. However, for printer based reports, if you know the printer you are working with, you could use symbolics to embed the correct codes into the field and display the colour that way.

There are also 3rd party tools available, both with and without ODBC requirements which should enable you to achieve your goals.

The Sprezzatura Group

World Leaders in all Things RevSoft

Thanks for the response.

For printer based reports do you mean embedding the old AREV 'esc' codes for each field that you wish to print? If so, then I can find those. If not, what codes are you referring to?

I haven't seen any 3rd party tools that add colors. Which ones? If you would rather not say in a public forum, then please email me with some suggestions.

Actually, as an aside, I am surprised that OI32 doesn't do colors better than it does. Maybe Mike R will address this in the new 7.0 version. I hope so anyway.

Gordon French, CPA

[email protected]

Gordon

Welcome back

We do have a product that colours COLUMNS in reports called S/List but it does not colour cells the way you want. However now that you have suggested it it MAY make a future release. (S/List is driven by user feedback). You can read a partial review in our latest SENL newsletter - see separate post.

We're thinking something like

If @Ans1, 2=\0000\ Then Colour=@Ans3, 3 ; @Ans1,5='

and making the 3 colour bytes RBG values.

You'd have to sort/search by other symbolics but would this approach work for you?

Regards

The Sprezzatura Group

World Leaders in all things RevSoft

Thanks for the welcome back(must be Andrew. nobody else knew i was missing)

I think that I understand your suggestion to be a conversion that is interpreted by Slist?! It seems that that would work OK. But what happens if you want to list the column without color(American spelling)? And while I do not need to sort by the 'color', I do need to sort by the same criteria that the conversion would use to color the cells in the column. That means that the Rlist(Slist) statememnt that generates the report would be using the 'color' column as a sort statement and as display statement - see following.

'List file by COLUMN1 break-on COLOR COLUMN1 '

Gordon French, CPA

spot on…

I think we're in the same area here. Effectively we'd provide a User Defined Conversion called say COLOR. You'd say something like

LIST FILE BY AMT_OUTSTANDING BREAK-ON AMT_OUTSTANDING_COLOR

where the latter had the UDC applied.

Should work quite well.

The Sprezzatura Group

World Leaders in all things RevSoft

Thanks a lot.

Between you and/or Mike R. I know that this can be done.

I'll wait for 7.0 AND the next Slist and see what happens.

Gordon French, CPA

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