Displaying a negative value as positive

Hi,
I'm using Access 2003. To keep it short, here's my dilema. I have a
Time Booking system, which allows operators to book time to a job. Each
job goes through a number of processes, each with a different operator.
When they have finished a job at their process, the operator ticks a
box to say "Job Completed at this process".

I've designed a form to show how many processes are currently complete
on each job. This uses a Crosstab query, which has the Job numbers in
the left hand column, and the processes across the top, with the
minutes booked at each process as the values.

If the job is complete at a process, I want the "cell" to be displayed
as red, but still display the minutes booked. So, if you can picture
this, most of the form is green, in tabular format, with lots of
numbers, but if I look at job number 71928 and go along that row until
I get to column "Saw 2", that particular cell is red because the
operator has ticked the box to say that at Saw 2 Job 71928 is now
complete.

The only way I could get the form to recognise which cells should be
red, was to make the minutes negative values in the crosstab query, for
those which are ticked as completed. Then I use conditional formatting
to turn the cell red if the value is less than zero.

This is all great and works well, except that I have values on the form
which are negative. I'm not doing calculations, so that's not a
problem, but I would like them to display as positive values (but it
must recognise that the actual value is nagative, and the cells must
remain red). Each control (cell) is bound to a field on the crosstab
query, so I can't change the value and in fact I don't want to change
the value, I just want them to display as positive.

In summary, I guess I could just have said, I have a control bound to a
read only query. The value is negative and I want it to remain
negative, but I want it to display as positve.

I hope this makes sense. Can anybody suggest a solution to this?

Colin

In summary, I guess I could just have said, I have a control bound to a
read only query. The value is negative and I want it to remain
negative, but I want it to display as positve.



Ok folks, stand down. My brain is in gear now and I've worked it out.
In the format property of each control, enter #;#

That does the trick, no problem,

Thanks anyway,

Colin