When variant is unpublished shows as no stock ?

I dont display prices at all, I use the software as a very good quote request system instead.

I thought when a variant was changed to unpublished it wouldnt show up in the dropdown ? It does show in the dropdown but displays the message 'no stock' instead on QTY and add to cart field instead.

Is this working as intended and I have missed something as I was hoping unpublished didnt publish the variant at all ?

If you have one variant which is not published while other sister variants are, the system still has to display the information of the unpublished variant as you can still select it in the dropdown. If you don't want to have a variant information displayed at all, you should delete the variant completely.

I have deleted the variant, which is a little bit of a shame as unpublishing products doesnt display them, so I would have hoped the same would have applied to a variant. Not a issue just would have been nice to still have the variant there to republish later rather than recreate if needed.

Recreating a variant is almost as easy publishing it. Just click on the new button, select the characteristics value you need, enter a product code and you can save the new variant.