formating in crystal reports

How to suppress the display of a template field or the text field in crystal report on its value being NULL or empty string.

This works only for numbers, it was not possible for me to do so for strings.

Can anybody help me in this regard.

This is a forum for discussion of SQL Server Reporting Services, not Crystal Reports...you might get lucky, but I don't think anyone will be able to answer your question here. Try the businessobjects website and see if they have some sort of public forum system -- I bet you'll have better responses there?

Form to create formula

Is it possible to create a form / pop up table for users to input criteria to search upon.

I am trying to set up a template to search, for example, for serial numbers where {contsupp.contact} = "serial number" (with other set criteria)is it possible to have this set up for users who are not familiar with crystal reporting so that they are prompted to insert a serial nuimber #1234 in a field which then populates the "serial number" area and runs the search?If you create a parameter field, you can set it in the select expert as the field you want (so, for example if you have serialnumber as a field, the parameter field (?serial) would be set up to use that field and then in the select expert you would select
{whatevertable.serialnumber}=?serial

Then, the crystal viewer will pop up a parameter select form automatically.