BI Stories

Tag: Formatting

  • 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.

  • Tooltip = Axis ?

    Tooltip = Axis ?

    Tableau has many little quirks. With time you get used to them, but for new developers some of the small stuff can be very frustrating at first, and a nudge in the right direction always helps. So here’s one of them.

    In Tableau charts, any numbers appearing in tooltips are formatted using the “Axis” format, and not the default “Pane” format. So if you want your chart label to show “24.1%”, and the axis to have 0%, 5%, 10%, etc., your tooltip will show “24%”, which is a bit strange. See the example below:

    The best solution in such a scenario is to duplicate the relevant field, so basically you’re using two different fields – one for the label and axis, and another for the tooltip. Now you can set the axis format for the tooltip field (“Profit ratio (copy)” in the example below) without causing your axis to show unnecessary digits.

    Is there a reason for this functionality? Logic says that the tooltip format should be similar to the label, not the axis (which is usually more “rounded”), but maybe there’s something hiding behind it. And there’s been an Idea (now on the Salesforce IdeaExchange) about changing it for 12 years…