Better number formatting

Baserow currently only supports a very simplistic version of number formatting, as far as I can tell. So far all you can specify is the number of decimal places and whether negatives are allowed.
Meanwhile, your average spreadsheet has quite sophisticated number formatting. You can specify decimal places, leading zeros, thousands separators, special purpose formatting (currency, percent, fractions, scientific notation, etc), and even custom formatting specs.

In my current use case, I wish Baserow would let me at least specify leading zeros so I could have integers of fixed width. However, an argument could probably be made for any of what your average spreadsheet offers.

While this would ideally be something added as additional options for a number column, it could also be provided via some sort of formula command to do number-formatting into an output column.

Given that my motivation for using Baserow is the merger of an easy-to-use spreadsheet UI with some database capabilities, all these little places where it can’t do something basic that any spreadsheet can do is a definite pain point.

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Hello @dkonigs, thanks for sharing your feature idea. I will discuss with the team whether the advanced number formatting or maybe a specific formula-based solution (as you mentioned) is planned to be implemented. Will keep you posted on this topic :ok_hand:

Hey @dkonigs, I’m back to you with some news: after discussing your suggestions, we all agreed that we need to improve the number formatting in Baserow. We also plan to add some new number-related field types like percent and currency ones.

Currency field type: Currency field (#489) · Issues · Bram Wiepjes / baserow · GitLab
Percent field type: Percent field type (#1269) · Issues · Bram Wiepjes / baserow · GitLab

As explained here: Here’s what happened during the last few weeks…, we cannot tell you when exactly these ideas will be implemented and deployed. But I created this general issue on GitLab, so you can keep track of the progress: Improve number formatting (#1270) · Issues · Bram Wiepjes / baserow · GitLab.