Formula Entry

You may find it useful to remember the following points when editing formulas:

• Formulas consist of 5 lines of at most 64 characters each. Internally they are treated as one long line of 320 characters. In theory this means you can split an identifier over two lines, but this is almost certainly a very bad idea.
• You can use <Ctrl+Y> to delete the part of the formula from the current position to the end of the line. Pressing <Ctrl+Y> will move the remaining lines up, joining the next line onto the end of this line.
• You can use <Ctrl+N> to split the current line and move the rest of the formula down.
• You can use <Ctrl+U> to restore the original state of the formula.

Formulas that are unusually long or complex can often be handled more conveniently by using the form #n for field names, or by defining additional fields to act as work fields to store intermediate values. For example, suppose we have a formula:

<condition_1> AND <condition_2>

We can define a non-database field X with a formula:

<condition_2>

and then use the formula:

<condition_1> AND X