How to use Tableau Software’s Custom Number Formats
Tableau provides a variety of built-in number and date formats. There are the standard formats “numbers”, “currency”, “scientific” and “percentage”. For scientific and percentage you can only change the decimal places, but for numbers and currencies you can also define the way negative values are displayed, the displayed units, the thousand separator and you can add a prefix and/or suffix to the number. For date fields, Tableau offers 17 different standard formats.
Tableau’s built-in number and date formats will meet most of your requirements. From time to time, however, you need something different. E.g. you want to see “Quarter” instead of “Q” on your date axis, you want to display numbers in hundreds or you need to add some text to the numbers displayed. This is where Tableau’s Custom Number Formats come into play. Today’s post provides some links to learn the principles and the syntax, includes some examples and discusses Tableau’s limitations compared to Microsoft Excel.