Base report builder formula input error

[Bwmove]

I’m trying to follow the Base tutorial “From Newbie to Advocate in a one, two… three!” by Mariano Casanova. On the report builder I’m trying to make a formula into a text box, but when I press the “…” on the Data tab on the Data Field with the “Field or Formula” selected, nothing happens. I tried to insert the formula “IF(ISBLANK([Date of termination];“Open Case”;[Date of termination])” by typewriting it but nothing happens this way. I also tried to input the same formula in the General tab in the expression or condition field, but it’s the same result.

Can anyone help me?

[w_whalley]

Thanks for pointing out this tutorial.
I believe that you are referring to the example on page 151. The line at the bottom of the page has a typo (missing “)” )that likely accounts for your not being able to type in the line and have it work. Try this:

IF(ISBLANK([Date of termination]);"Open Case";[Date of termination])

Using Debian Linux LibreOffice 3.5.4 I found that the wizard activated by the ellipsis (…) behaved as described. Using Windows 7 and LibreOffice 3.6.4 I could not get the wizard to work. May be a bug.

[Bwmove]

Thanks for the help.
Yes I thinks it’s a bug on the part on the data tab, the formula wizard doesn’t work. But after some workaround I found the problem is with the format type. If the “IF” function returns TRUE value nothing happens, if it returns the FALSE value it works perfectly. If I set the format to “date” the FALSE value appears correctly, but the “Open Case” it’s not a date type, so it will left in blank. If I set the format to text type even in the FALSE case the result will be a blank box (nothing happens in both cases).
Do you or anyone have an idea for what type should be on the FORMAT. I’ve tried on Calc this formula and works perfectly with the default case, but not on BASE.

[w_whalley]

I was getting inconsistent results when I re-edited the formula in the Data Field box. When I started with a fresh text box, formatted as a date, and typed in the formula, it worked. A blank date value displayed the text; a date was displayed as a formatted date.