turning results to negatives in calcs

[andymarkbrown]

I'm creating a great circle distance calculator using latitude and longitude co-ordinates.

Everything has gone well so far, but i need to be able to turn a calculation result to either a positive or negative figure based on the results of another field (either N or S).

Can anyone tell me the best way to do this in a calculation field? I have tried to do this with logical statements but it's not my strong point.

Many thanks in advance from a novice!

[BobWeaver]

ResultSoFar * Case(OtherField="N",1,-1)

[andymarkbrown]

Thank you Bob,

This worked a treat - it made my cluncky work-around look like a wreck.

Thanks again,

Andy

[Vaughan]

Ahhh... I have seen "clunky workarounds" that have been inventive and inspired! Completely inappropriate for their purpose, but inventive and inspired none the less. So by all means go ahead and do it the "right" way but remember your workarounds, they'll come in handy some time later.

Last week I got a qestion about layouts -- somebody had a database with over 600 layouts in it! The layout names were all very similar and the layout menu in Browse mode was getting too difficult to use to select layouts (in fact FMP was crashing). Anyway, they asked me to put the layouts into "folders" like some of the others. "Folders," I thought, "Naa, gotta be crazy."

So here is the inventive and inspired clunky workaround (finally!). They had created "folders" for layouts in the layouts menu by adding spaces at the front of the layout names like this -- at least it looked like folders, or outline view...

Nursing Layout 1

Layout 2

Layout 3

Law Layout 1

Layout 2

Of course it did nothing to solve the underlying problem -- that somebody confused layouts with records -- but gee I thought it was a neat way to arrange layout names!