Select the Unbound Element.

On the Format tab of the Property Editor, select the type you want from the Format Unbound As dropdown.

Ah, UNbound!  That's what's been tripping me up.  These are all bound to the column names, things like !(30-60 days).  No wonder Sesame is flipping out.  Once I removed the binding I could change the type.  Thanks Erika!  (Now watch me forget how to do this and ask again in a month.)

And thanks, Bob, I saw what you were saying (and had already tried that with no luck, of course).

My next question, unrelated to types and binding, but still dealing with derived columns, is this:  Can a derived column do a call-out comparison to a value stored in a text file on disk?

Here's my situation:  my boss likes to run a "monthly billed" report.  This report lists all the invoices billed this month, with 2 derived columns.  One is a running total, (which is giving me a little trouble.  In Q&A the derived column uses the programming

 Running_Total = Invoice_Amount + Running_Total 

which works fine in Q&A but is doubling the amount of the first invoice in Sesame.  I need to whack away at it a little, see what I'm doing wrong, get it to start from zero somehow.)

The other column is "needed to tie", which compares the running total to the total amount of LAST YEAR'S current month invoices.  In Q&A each month I have to go in and redesign the report and hard code in the amount of, say, last April's billing.  So say we billed $500,000.00 last April, the programming would be:

 Needed_to_Tie = 500000.00 - Running_Total 

and this nicely counts down as invoices are added during the month, hopefully eventually becoming zero and then a negative if we do more business than last April.

Now, since Sesame can read from external files, it would be a heck of a lot easier for me to store that $500,000.00 value in a text file, and tell the report to go look at the value in that file and then subtract Running_Total from it.  That way I could change the figure on the fly each month at whim, and not have to go into report designer, redesign, save, reconcile, the whole bit.

So....is this do-able, or am I dreaming?

Thanks Ray, I'll give it a try first thing tomorrow.

Thanks, Bob, that's intriguing.  Would an XLookup from a report's derived column be done differently than an XLookup in a form's programming?

Wow, you guys have really got me thinking.  Would it be possible to craft an xlookup that takes its argument based on the current month name, using @month to key on an external field?  If so, I could store a year's worth of monthly totals in an external database in 12 different fields, each named for a different month.

That looks beautiful, but yes, last year's figures are what I would be storing.  So, maybe:

Var MonthTotal as Int
MonthTotal = @XLookup("Data\Totals.db", @Year(@Date) - 1, "Year", @Month$(@Date)) 

What should I name the external fields?  I really only need to look a year back.  Would I just give them month names?

Thanks Ray, I'll let you know how it works out.