Hi there!
I wanted to ask about adding a custom number format.
Right now we have the option between preselected currencies, comma, percentage and exponential. I’d love to see a “custom” option where you can add your own string to append (or prepend) to every numeric value.
This would just help in cleaning up how it looks when recording data that is not financial, for example… Data usage. It is of course possible to just record it as a number, and not append a string to it, but it is much easier to read this way.
The column can look like this, but still be read from as a numeric value rather than adding it as text.
I love this idea of adding a unit/label on to a number. Great idea for a future improvement.
If you’re looking to improve this from a data-entry perspective, you could make the Data Usage column a trigger formula column that automatically adds the unit onto an entered value, using the formula value + " MB" and apply on changes to the current column, Data Usage. Then, you could type 25 and the unit would automatically be added when you hit enter.
Hi, any update on this? I just came across this need as well.
I would also like to mention that it’s probably not about adding prefixes/suffixes, but more generally providing the number format. The way Excel does it is pretty good, which is you can do something like “My number: #,###.##” and the value would show up like “My number: 5,342.49”.
The Trigger formula solution above is good for display purposes, but then the column is no longer a numeric type, so you can’t aggregate on it (i.e., in the example above to be able to SUM up the Data Usage).
Not to hijack this topic, but can I just drop in to say: Grist could really profit from separating cell input and cell output generally. Ideally, we could set an (optional) “display formula” per column. That way, you could use a trigger formula to compute the actual value and a different formula to change how it appears.
From what I understand of Grist’s internals, this wouldn’t require an awful lot of changes, either. The data engine would just have to call the “display formula” whenever it recomputes the cell, and store the resulting “visual data” somewhere. And the display widgets for table view and others would have to be adjusted accordingly, so that they show the “visual data” (if present) rather than actual data.
I’d love to hear what people think of this.
