decrementing number tags

[Les Smalley]

As far as I know, FM's autonumber counters only increment, or at best remain unchanged, and there is no way to tel FM to evaluate the numbering in a table from the bottom up (although yuo can tell it to count across rows first or down columns first).

So David's suggestion won't work, as if you do sort the table, the re-evaluation that takes place will cause the numbers to appear in ascending order once again unless this behavior has changed in FM 9 (which I don't have to check it) or now FM 10.

I'm afraid the only solutions inside FM are: to manually number the items as you desire, and be prepared for the effort if something new is inserted (which may not be an issue with only 32 items, and that may be the fixed limit from your description); or maintain the table in ascending order on a reference page, and on the body page use cross-references to display the items in descending order.

You can do this in a package like Excel, and then import that into a FM table, but that will convert the formula for numbering into static text, so keep the spreadsheet around if you need to insert items and reimport it to replace the table. (Which sounds like it's more touble than its worth, especially compared to the import from Excel option.)

– Les Smalley
   L_C_Smalley at yahoo.com

--- On Mon, 1/24/11, David Spreadbury <dspreadb at yahoo.com> wrote:
If you don't have any cross-references in the table you could sort the table in reverse order. Keep in mind, most search algorithms work on the ASCII code of the character. After the sort the numbering will come out as 1, 10,11,2,21,3, etc. If you make the numbers all the same length, 01, 02, 03, etc, then they should come out correctly. You could then go back and remove the leading zeroes.

If you do have cross-references, they will have to be remade after the sort.

--- On Mon, 1/24/11, Orly Zimmerman <orlyz at marvell.com> wrote:

Hi All,
Any ideas about how to get numbering tags such that the numbers decrement instead of increment?
I tried to use a number property of  <n-> or <n=N-1> - after setting the first in the series to 31
I need this because I want to create a table column with numbers starting from 31 going down to 0 to describe error messages.
Any ideas will be appreciated.
Thanks,
Orly