3: Building a Data Model to support self-service reporting
3.5 Modify column formatting
3: Building a Data Model to support self-service reporting
3.5 Modify column formatting - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems
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<v ->In this sub lesson</v> we're gonna talk about what data formats are, why you would want to use data formats, and, of course, we'll go through a demo of using data formats. Okay so, once again, we'll go to our Get Help files here. We're gonna open up the file here called L_03_05 that corresponds to sub lesson number five here. So let's go ahead and double click on that to open it and wait a moment. Okay so, with our desktop file open what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to the Data View and we're gonna navigate ourselves over to the sales table. So let's go ahead and open it the fields pan a little more, we'll open up the sales table. And what we're going to do here is start off by clicking on the line, Total Sales PQ. Once we do that, we'll notice at the very top of the screen we get a tab here called column tools. And what we're going to do is focus on this group of commands right here called formatting. Okay. So what we're going to do here is on the Total Sales PQ, we're going to go through and make sure we get a format set up properly. So we are going to go ahead and choose currency. So we're just going to go like this and say currency, which was already selected. And then what we want to do next here is we want to go in and go over here to the currency symbols and say English United States. So we're going to go ahead and do that. Okay. So then we're going to also make sure that we have our commas being separated here. So we'll go ahead and choose the comma. And we see that two decimal places what's going to be shown. So now we've gone through and formatted the line, Total Sales PQ. So we're going to go ahead and do the exact same thing with unit price next. So I'm going to click on the Unit Price down below here. Once again, we have currency being selected. Let's just go to the display format here and choose English United States. We'll see that the decimal places moves from auto to two, and we've got the comma separated here as well. And finally, let's click on the Order Quantity one right here and make sure that we have it formatted the way we want. We can see that it is a format of a whole number. The only thing we're going to do here is let's go ahead and add in the comma separator for the thousands positions. So if anything is over the thousands it's going to go ahead and add that comma in there. Okay. So quite simply, we're able to go in there and format some of these columns here and then you may ask yourself, why are we actually even doing this? And what this does this provide some default formatting for the way that you want these columns to show up at report time. And one of the nice things about this is this keeps your end-users who are operating in a self-service capacity, potentially, from having to do a lot of this work on their own even though they can handle a lot of this stuff up the visualizations level. We do like to take care of as many of these things as possible at the data model level. So these, these defaults are shareable across multiple different reports. Okay? So that's a pretty simple and straightforward sub lesson. And that brings us to the end of the sub lesson on modifying column formatting.