Formatting is giving a value meaning by adding units of measurements, thousands and decimal separators, and other information. Locale settings, determined by Windows Regional Settings, are used to determine formatting, but you can also make certain changes yourself, such as whether to show thousands separators or how many decimals to show.
Formatting does not include visual properties, such as color, font, or size.
Example: If you have Windows Regional Settings set to Swedish and select to show thousands separators and the numbers are in US currency, you will get formatted values such as $1.000.000,00. If you change your locale settings to US English, the value will be re-formatted into $1,000,000.00.
Which formatting options are available depends on the data type of the value. Text cannot be formatted at all, while an integer has several different possibilities. An integer can, among other things, be formatted as a number, currency and as percentage. You can set the number of decimals to be displayed, as well as whether or not to use a thousands separator. Another possibility is to use short number format, which is a way to shorten values to take up less space by replacing powers of tens with symbols. See Short Number Format to learn more. You can apply formatting to your data on different levels and you can access the settings in different ways as described below.
Default axis formatting
In the Options dialog you can set default formatting for data types on the visualization axes. For example, if you set the data type integer to be formatted as US currency ($) with two decimals, then each time you create a new visualization in Spotfire, values on an axis with integers will be displayed as US currency with two decimals. Note that these default formatting settings do not affect the columns or the data tables in any way, only the axes in the visualizations.
To reach the default settings, select Tools > Options on the menu bar, and go to the Axis Formatting page in the dialog.
Column formatting
If you want a specific column in a data table to be formatted in a certain way throughout the analysis, you can format values on a column level. For example, if you format a column called "Cost" as US currency ($) with two decimals, the values in the column "Cost" will be displayed as US currency with two decimals every time that column is used. These settings affect all the places where the column is used in the analysis, including axes in visualizations, filters, tooltips, etc., and changes take effect immediately. Column formatting overrides formatting on default axis formatting level.
To change formatting settings on column level, see To change the formatting of a column. You can also select Data > Column properties on the menu bar, and go to the Formatting tab.
Formatting in visualizations
You can also format values in individual visualizations. For example, if you format the values on the X-axis of a scatter plot as Number with no decimals, the values on the X-axis in that scatter plot will be instantly updated with the new formatting settings. The Y-axis in the scatter plot will not be affected by the new settings, and no other visualizations in the analysis will adopt the changes. Formatting on this level overrides settings on both the default axis level and on the column level. You can define formatting settings on the axes in many of the visualizations, but not all. Formatting on visualization level is similar in all kinds of visualizations, but the cross table differs slightly and is described in Formatting in the Cross Table.
To change formatting settings on the visualization level, right-click in the visualization, select Properties from the pop-up menu, and then open the Formatting page. You can also right-click directly on the scale labels of a visualization to open a pop-up menu, then select Formatting and the formatter you want to use for the axis.
If you use more than one scale in a visualization, you can format each of the scales individually the same way you format an axis in a visualization. However, if there is more than one scale on the same side of an axis in a visualization, you cannot format the scales on that side separately by right-clicking directly on the scale. This will instead change the settings for all scales. However, you can still format the scales separately from the Formatting page in the properties dialog.
No matter on which level you format, the options are the same. See Formatting Settings to get a full description of all the options.
See also:
Details on Column Properties - Formatting
Custom Formatting of Date and Time Columns