For those of you obsessed with key-stroke optimisation here’s a neat little trick for saving a few key strokes every time you want to type out a number with large display units, e.g. thousands, millions, billions.

In short, instead of desperately trying to remember and carefully counting how many zeros go into a billion, you can instead type “1b”. Tableau actually understands this on its own, however if you want to be absolutely certain that Tableau will translate this correctly, if you then hit the TAB key it will auto-fill all the digits!

This trick will work when typing into numerical areas of tableau such as setting a filter or a constant line but not into areas that accept text input, such as when creating a calculated field.

I can confirm this at least works for Thousands (t), Millions (m), Billions (b), and even Trillions (t), so you if you’re regularly using big numbers this could save some time, lengthen the life-time of your keyboard, and reduce the chance of accidentally adding too few or too many zeros!