Q:

CF Report Builder displaying html tags (ie rich text) as plain text

This is the content from the database:
<p><b>As the newly reborn Modbook Inc.</b> </p>

The actual output in the report page is the same (including the html tags).
<p><b>As the newly reborn Modbook Inc.</b> </p>

The expected output was bold text like:
As the newly reborn Modbook Inc. 

A:

From what I've seen you'll need to use a custom function. It looks like someone was trying to use that solution as recent as 19 March 2012.  I see here on Kay Smol­jak's blog that there is a property to handle some of the tags but I haven't tested it (and it's from almost 7 years ago, however considering the lack of popularity in report builder I doubt Adobe's done much to help the issue).

The mys­te­ri­ous HTML For­mat­ted Text property
The lat­est build of the Report Builder included a new prop­erty for
  text objects – HTML For­mat­ted Text (true or false). It’s not in the
  pro­gram help or in the live­docs. Basic HTML that I tried –
  para­graphs, Hx ele­ments and strong ele­ments – didn’t seem to work –
  the markup showed in the ren­dered report. Through a process of trial
  and error, I dis­cov­ered that  ele­ments do work. Other
  presentation-style HTML such as the  ele­ment prob­a­bly also work.

