Balance column disappeared

The way the Balance column is handled when not sorted by date seems like a bad compromise the developers came up with. Originally in Quicken Mac, if you sorted by anything there than date, the Balance column became blanked out, to show that no balance is available when sorted by a columns such as Payee or Category. But users were calling Support saying their Balance column disappeared and not understanding why. So the developers decided to display values, but make them gray and italic. Does this explain things better to a user who doesn't understand their register isn't sorted by date? No. It's equally, if not more, confusing. So we get users who post in the forum who are understandably confused by the crazy values they're seeing. I don't understand the decision that showing nonsensical numbers in gray italic is less confusing to users than showing no numbers. Ideally, they would have grayed the column, with no numbers, and displayed a message within the column like "Running Balance available when sorted by Date" — but I'm sure the code they're using to display the table of transactions doesn't support doing that.