Custom number format

[Luka_Kaspar]

A useful feature for plain number entries would in my opinion be custom number formats.

For example I have entries like 0052 and the Number field type will delete the zeros.

Thanks for the consideration :slightly_smiling_face:

PS fantastic product you have going here!

[Katherine_Duh]

Thanks for the feedback! I’ll pass it onto the rest of the team. In the meantime, the single-line text field is probably your best bet to preserve your formatting.

[Luka_Kaspar]

Indeed, that’s what I’ve been using, since my use case doesn’t require more at this point :slightly_smiling_face:

And thanks for the quick response.

[Anthony_Alonzo]

Hi just a suggestion try using this REPT(“0”, 4 - LEN("" & RecID))) & RecID where Recid is the numeric field you wish to format and the number 4 is the number of leading zeros you wish to have.

[Chris_Mondeau]

Great solution! I had to adapt mine to the autonumber and use the concat function to force it a text.

REPT(“0”,4-LEN(CONCATENATE(GUID,"")))&GUID

[Kamille_Parks]

Please add number formatting to Autonumbers! I know there are workarounds for things like leading zeros, as demonstrated by @Chris_Mondeau, but these solutions will always require an extra field/column.

I can’t imagine this would be any different than the precision dropdown for Currency, Percentage, and Number Field Types to control minimum digit length of an autonumber (to achieve leading zeros).

In the same vain of leading zeros, it would be nice for Autonumbers to have prefix and suffix text (implemented just like the currency symbol box for the Currency Field Type). Yes, you can accomplish this with a separate formula field, but why force users to write formulas for something so simple?

[Baden_Appleyard]

I’m starting to become quite concerned that Airtable is just not listening to the community that is wrapped around it that loves it. None of their suggestions (which are excellent) that I have seen are being implemented. For example, this is now almost 4 years old and as Kamille said,

“Yes, you can accomplish this with a separate formula field, but why force users to write formulas for something so simple?”

This is one of many I have found when Im searching for a solution to a problem that others have found before me. I am recommending Airtable to other new and potential users and am frequently embarrassed when they get to the same point that I do and say 'but why cant it just do x".

Happy to take this off line for discussion but can you tell me what the process is inside Airtable for considering and developing community suggestions for product improvements? I trust there is something more than “I’ll pass it on”. The Airtable community and their input should be as important to Airtable as it is promoted to be.

[Wes_Webber]

This seems so basic I cant believe this is not yet possible. We need to be able to format numbers with comma separators for thousands. This shouldn’t be a hard endeavor.

[Markus_Wernig]

I fully agree with the number of frustrated users - it’s standard in spreadsheet apps to have a custom format option for “allowing numbers to lead with 0”.

While there sure is the “text field workaround”, here’s where this approach makes things more complicated than necessary:

The moment you include these “text numbers” in a formula, you also have to format them as text by adding ’ ’ around them. Seems so unnecessary since the Formula field already has a formatting tab for numbers…
Frustrating!

Please do add more standard formatting options for numbers!

[Karl_at_Easy_La]

While the REPT(“0”,4-LEN(CONCATENATE(GUID,"")))&GUID solution works, I find absurd that one has to resort to such long-winded formulas to format a number.  It would be great if Airtable could implement a function like TEXT() in google sheets