I mentioned this technique in passing a few months ago (Portal Sorting, part 2), but today I would like to examine it in greater detail. Have you ever had a text object or a field that you wanted to selectively change based on some logical condition? For example, say you have a check box, and want the label next to the check box to change depending on whether the box is checked or not, like so:
In the old (pre-FileMaker 9) days, you could have used auto-enter or calculated field trickery, but now, thanks to the modern miracle of Conditional Formatting, you can make this happen at the layout level, rather than having to pollute your table schema.