Workbook Locale

Many times, I’ve encountered Tableau developers struggling with the date formatting in their workbooks, mostly as it defaults to the US format (mm/dd) instead of what they need – and then they waste time setting custom formats for date fields in various worksheets.

The solution to this, and one of the lesser known features of Tableau Desktop, is the “Workbook Locale” setting, located under the “File” menu.

The “Automatic” option defaults to your computer’s regional settings, but if you select “More” you can choose your language, and then all date and number formats in the workbook will use that setting by default.

Even less known is the fact that this setting, at the workbook level, overrides any other regional locale. So if you save the workbook with a locale other than “Automatic”, the date and currency format is fixed, even after publishing to Tableau Server or Cloud.

The order of precedence is listed below, and documented here:

1. Workbook locale (set in Tableau Desktop)
2. Tableau Server User Account language/locale settings
3. Web browser language/locale
4. Tableau Server Maintenance page language/locale settings
5. Host computer’s language/locale settings

The bottom line – you can control everything using Workbook Locale, so use it, unless you need varying formats for users in different languages or countries, of course.