Act! allows for formatted text in several details and notes fields. Different fonts and styles can be used to change the appearance of the text content in these fields.

In the Act! database, this type of formatting is stored in Rich Text Format, where the formatting codes are stored in the database field along with the text itself. For Act! fields supporting this formatting, Reporting4Act! makes two versions of the fields available for reporting: a Text Only version and a With Formatting version.

The Text Only version of the field strips out all of the rich text formatting codes, so only the plain text appears in the report. This allows the text to match the formatting of the rest of the report. However, this process of stripping out the codes takes a small amount of extra time, so large reports using these fields will take more time to run. For this reason, filtering on these fields is not allowed. Such a filter would require stripping the formatting codes from all records in the entire table, which would result in poor performance when running the report.

The With Formatting version of the field retrieves the full field data, including the formatting codes. Reporting on such a field directly will include these codes in the output.

This can be useful when outputting the report to a data file that will be used by another process where the codes are useful. However, most often it's preferred to display the formatted text as it appears in Act! itself. This is done by setting the Display as option to Formatted Rich Text in the field properties.

The With Formatting fields can be used in filter conditions, since there is no extra processing involved during their data retrieval.