Many thanks for your reply. I forgot to mention that my Value list field is a Year plus a fund-raising campaign, thus I can't define it as numeric, thus a negative has no effect.
There are too many values to hard-code, and there are new ones every year. You were right on in the portal scroll bar: the Pen Color has to be a visible color on the layout. That solved the problem! Ron Carr From: FileMaker Pro Discussions [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Richard S. Russell Sent: Thursday, January 01, 2009 3:49 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Sort Value List / Portal scroll bar On 2009 Jan 1, at 9:24, Ron wrote: Q1. I am unable to sort a Value List into descending order - it contains a year and I need the latest year at the beginning. Any ideas on how to do this? Under "Manage Value List", you can pop open any value list and find 3 options: . Use values from field [you pick which one] . Use value list from another file . Use custom values I'm assuming you're using the 1st option, which forces alphabetical order on you. If you have a manageable number of values you're dealing with, consider hard-coding them into your value list using the 3rd option. This has the upside of letting you specify whatever order you want but the downside of needing to be periodically updated instead of dynamically revised as you add more data to the target field. OR ... Another option is to create a Calculation field (Number result) called, let us say, "NegYear". It would be simply the "Year" field with a minus sign in front of it. Then, within "Specify Value Lists" using the 1st option ("Specify Fields"), set "NegYear" as the 1st field, "Year" as the 2nd field, "Show values only from 2nd field", and "Sort values using 1st field". I think that may do it for you. Q2. I have a number of portals, each on a separate Tab. Some of them will show a scroll bar, some won't. Scroll bars show whether empty or not, on the ones that do show. Of course I have show vertical scroll bar checked on all entries. Why can't I make them all show? In the ones that don't show, can you see visible lines between the portal rows? If not, that means that you've got that particular portal set to line width 0 or line color invisible. If you CAN see the lines between the rows but still not the scroll bars, you've stumped me.
