I am using CR2013. My report is grouped by Employee ID. There are 40 columns and in each column, there is a suppression formula being applied to hide any records where the record is in: ['ESSRole','PortalUser','BatchRole','PLPrdAccess','MSSRole']
OR
if the running total (I have a running total for each of the 40 columns)is >=1.

My next step is to identify ONLY the employees where SOMETHING is still being displayed in any of the 40 columns. For example, Bob has one record still displaying in column 18. He should still appear on the report. Sarah has no records appearing in any of the 40 columns, so she should be hidden. Is this possible? I attempted to try and conditionally suppress within the group any of the columns that are null, but technically, they are not null, so nothing is being suppressed.

All thoughts are welcome.

Edited by thummel1 - 22 Feb 2018 at 9:34am

They appear to still be not null, and they still return the same length string. I decided to try and apply the same suppression in the group within the Section expert. It seemed to be working there until I got to column 6 of 40. Suddenly all records appeared again instead of only returning those that had something in any of the preceding columns. I assumed there must be an error in one of my 3 'column 6' formulas, but I didn't see anything, leading me to think there's an error elsewhere that's interpreting data differently than I'm expecting. I'll keep digging into this, thanks

First I think you are applying tings in a stepped order and that is not how the suppression process is going to work. All the criteria of are equal value and processed at the same time except possibly the running total. It will be evaluated later which may be part of the issue.
Are you really using a Running Total or could you use a Summary Function? the result of it can be used as a group selection or group suppression criteria, unlike the RT.