Three days into my Data School experience and it’s high time for my first ever blog! Today we dived into Tableau for the first time and whilst looking at filters I stumbled across something that even a Zen Master didn’t know, so I thought I’d share my little tip…

When you filter by a range of numbers, it can be difficult to adjust the range to specific values on the quick filter card. As you may already know, you can actually edit the ranges directly by clicking on a number in the quick filter card and simply typing over it. However, if you’re working with really large numbers it can be a real pain to quickly work out how many zeros you need to add to the end to get the desired result.

Excel junkies may be used to the trick of exploiting exponential notation to automatically generate zeros; that is, inputting 1e3 for 1,000 or 1e6 for 1,000,000. Someone at Tableau clearly had those of us who rely on this shortcut in mind because, lo and behold, if you type 1e3 into the filter card it automatically converts it to 1,000!

I hope you find this useful, look out for my next blog coming up very soon. #DS2