Areas

Hi everyone

If this is not the right place to ask for help, please excuse me and point me in the right direction. 

I have 2 issues:
1- I have 7 areas for my plant (1-7) allocated to the equipment. I need to acknowledge all the alarms of a certain section with the click of one button. I have looked at the GrpOpen function and SetArea, trying to acknowledge a group, but I do not how how to assign the tags/equipment that belongs to an area to a certain group. 

2- On my alarm page, I am trying to show the Area property/parameter of the alarm. Problem is that area 1-7 corresponds to Area "A530" - "A536" and I want to show the string version "A530" insted of the integer value "1" in the line. When using the following alarm format, it works to show the integer value 100
{PRIORITY, 10}^t{DATE,20}^t{TIME,25}^t{AREA,15}^t{NAME,50}^t{ALMCOMMENT,70}^t{DESC,90}^t{STATE,10}

I can add the string to each alarm property/parameter "Custom 1" but I cannot get it to show that string value on the alarm page when  I use the following format:
{PRIORITY, 10}^t{DATE,20}^t{TIME,25}^t{CUSTOM1,15}^t{NAME,50}^t{ALMCOMMENT,70}^t{DESC,90}^t{STATE,10}

Does anyone have some advice or guidance please