>>It doesn't matter if you operate as an in-house employee or an outside contractor; whatever pointy-haired boss said it had to work that way would have to decide to spend the money - whether your time is worth anything is their decision, as long as you get paid.
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>Well said, Ed. Bear in mind that for me, though, that means spending your taxpayer dollars on such non-necessities < s >
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Well, better that than $10,000 toilet seats! < g >

>>Noone has mentioned the approach I'd take to this problem - get away from the need for the graphic icon entirely. This is actually not difficult - it'd just be a matter of using a font with the necessary up- and down-arrow symbols in them, and then when sort orders changed, it'd be a simple matter of changing the caption of the header to add/remove the appropriate character. And this gets around the sizing issue as well. This now becomes a more reasonable scenario - the cost is now the cost of the necessary font license if you don't have one with the symbols you need already...but then, I'm lazy and don't give a rat's patootie if it does what the user wants but isn't exactly the graphical appearance they'd like. I'm in favor of letting them decide between fast to implement, easy to maintain and inexpensive to implement, or lots of time spent researching a solution, getting bit down the road for more time if the behavior has to change, and expensive. It's their money, and
>>they're the pointy-haired boss...
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>>BTW, Courier New and Arial both have « » if pointing left and right rather than up and down would work, everything has < >, and Symbol has the graphical arrows you'd need, but not letters and numbers. I'd expect to find mathematical or engineering fonts that had them needed character sets from someone like Adobe pretty easily...
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>That idea has been mentioned on the UT sometime in the past, as I recall. Don't know if anyone's actually done it, though...

Oh, I know someone who's used the « » to indicate sort direction...seems my boss wanted to see which column was in use for display sort purposes and ascending/descending order, and felt that free was a good thing! (BTW, he's bald...)

All that had to be done when we switched sort expression order was to change the caption of two colums - strip the two leading characters of the caption for the old sort columns, and prefix the caption of the new sort column with the appropriate symbol and a space. I also switch the font of the column to italic to indicate that it's the sort column, making it easy and obvious. We use italic because the default for grids is to have the header boldfaced.

Other easy visual signs would be a change in the forecolor or backcolor, or the font itself (maybe switch to a CopperPlate family font, which uses small caps rather than lowercase characters.)

At times, cheaper is better, and perhaps can be visually more effective...