January 15, 2010 
The Crystal Reports tip from Flexible Solutions GP Reports November newsletter shows how to selectively highlight values in a list without having to write a formula.
Let’s say you have a customer list with balances:
Now what if you wanted to make all customers with balances of $50,000 or higher more visible? Here are the steps to do this using the Highlighting Expert in Crystal Reports (click on any of the screen shots to enlarge them):
- Right click on the field you want to change the display for and choose Highlighting Expert (or click on the field and go to Format > Highlighting Expert).
- Click New at the bottom of the Item list.
- Under Item editor select the conditions to check for and the color, font, background or border you want to display. Below is an example to simply highlight any amount $50,000 or greater in yellow:
Or to make the amounts show in red, bold and italics, it would look like this:
Note that I set the Background to Default Color, so that my alternate line shading is preserved. (Check out my Alternating shading for lines in Crystal Reports to see how to set up alternate shading.) - Click OK to close the Highlighting Expert window and your report will now look like this:
If you want to highlight the entire line instead of just the amount, you can repeat the steps above for each field on your line, the only change would be under the Item editor section, where you would be testing the condition for your balance field, here is what that looks like:
And here is the final result, after adding the highlighting to each detail field:
For more tips like this, sign up to receive GP Reports newsletters via e-mail. Or check out the newsletter archives on the Flexible Solutions website.
Victoria Yudin 
I love the Highlighting Expert, except that the thresholds (50k in the above example) apparently can only be constants. I need for the threshold for highlighting to be a parameter passed into the report. Is that possible?
LikeLike
Hi Tim,
I don’t think you can do that with the highlighting expert. But you should be able to achieve what you want by formatting the field…for example, right click on the field, choose Format Field, on the Border tab choose a background color and click on the formula icon next to it – there you can enter a formula the true condition for which would make the field background change to the color you specified. In the formula you can use anything on the report, including parameters.
-Victoria
LikeLike