IFThen conditional function cannot return a text string in True/False-Parameter

Summary:

For a variance column using the function VarPer([A],[D]) comparing Actual to Budget I get some crazy high positive or negative percentages e.g. when Budget data is very low compared to Actual. This does not look good in the report and we want to show e.g. “<-1.000%” in a cell when the variance has data less that -1000%.

To do this I have tried with this function (but get an error saying that the formula is invalid):

IFTHEN(([A]/[D]*100<-1000), "<-1000", VarPer([A],[D]))

It looks like that the TrueParameter can only handle column references or numbers and NOT a text string like "<-1000".