For the brands, are you trying to select based on an array of brands?

We have over 850 Brands and over 35,000 items. Certain customers cant buy some Brands because that brand doesn't want them sold on 3rd party sites like Amazon or that customer got banned from that brand for selling below MAP pricing. So I want to exclude those brands from their Quantity report. Thats why I have a excel sheet with customer numbers and the brands they cant purchase. I thought I would be slick and put a partial formula in a excel cell ["Smith's Sharpeners","Arkansas Sharpeners"] and refer that cell/field  {Sheet1_.Restrict} in the crystal formula.

Sage has a feature for purchase control... which works by ItemCode or ProductLine.

If we give them a list of items they can purchase we don't have to edit the orders and they don't have to tell their customers that they cant get that item. We get a lot or orders imported from our website. And Purchase Control Maintenance doesn't work with order imported in from our website too.

This would restrict the actual data entry in Sage.  Then you could link to the restrictions (vlookups / custom report) to flag items as restricted.

If you used proper customer numbers per order, this feature should work.  (A generic customer number for web orders would not).