I have a portal with a number of related records. One of the fields in the portal is a calculated text field which shows the name of any user currently using that record, if any. If no user is using that record, the field is empty.

I would like to sort this portal so that all the records which are in use by users are listed at the top of the portal in ascending order (A, B, C...). However, when I sort the portal in this way, FileMaker considers the empty records to come before those with values in them, and thus all those records appear at the bottom. Might anyone have a suggested solution for this?

Thanks in advance.

(Note. One thing I have tried is to change the calculation of that field to instead have some value (i.e. "zzzz") if nobody is using that record. I would then conditionally format any "zzzz" records for that text to be white. However, the presentation of the portal is also important, so it has a color set as an Alternate Background Fill. This causes those fields that are formatted white to still show up for every other portal row. If there is a way around this, I would greatly appreciate knowing about it. Thanks)

You're on the right track.

Create a second calculated field to sort by with the "zzzz" but display the first.

I would then conditionally format any "zzzz" records for that text to be white.

Conditionally format any "zzzz" records for that text to be font size: 150 ( not White )

That works. Thanks.