Being able to change number formatting is one of the most simple but important features of a data storytelling tool. For example, you are trying to represent percentages but instead of 2,152% – as you added your numbers in the data – your visualization is showing 2152 as a value?.
Flourish enables you to easily change the number format.
In this article
How to add a prefix or suffix
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Switch to the Data tab and check what type of decimal separator your data uses. In this example, it's a comma.
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Click on the data typing button in the top right corner of the column, which is circled in red below. You can change the input format.
In this case, we want to change the decimal separator to a comma. You can also change the output format, which changes the format that gets displayed.
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If you would like to display your number as a percentage, you will have to add a suffix. You can do this under the Number formatting options and then heading to the Suffix setting. You can also add a prefix.
- You can also specify the number of decimal places to be displayed.
TIP: It is also possible to enter a negative number to round to a whole number with that many zeros. For example, -2 will round to the nearest hundred.
How to multiply or divide values
When working with data with large numbers, you might want to round them to thousands, millions, or billions. You can achieve this with our number formatting settings.
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Go to the number formatting settings and toggle on Advanced.
By switching on Add matching positive sign, you can show a + in front of positive numbers .
You also have the option to Remove trailing zeros and to hide the thousands separator for values below 10,000.
- Flourish also enables you as easily to Multiply/divide values, by clicking on the relevant setting toggle.
- You can choose between:
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- Multiply by: Multiplies all your values by a certain value
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Divide by: Divides all your values by a certain value
Example: Dividing 1.94E+09 by 1000000000 will return 1.94 -
x 10 to the power of: Instead of having lots of zeros, you show how many powers of 10 will make that many zeroes. When supplying a negative number, it will round to that number of zeroes. For example, -3 will give you thousands, and -6 will give you millions.
Example: Supplying -9 powers of 10 for 1.94E+09 will return 1.94
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TIP: Use the x 10 to the power of option to easily display millions or billions without having to calculate what to divide your values by.
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- Add a prefix or a suffix, for example, "billions", under Number styling and then Suffix.
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In our example, the data is supplied in the format 1.94E+09. Through our number formatting options, we can easily display it as billions.
Would you instead like to add a different number format for each series? Click here to find out more.