How to Remove Decimals in Tableau

Nothing clutters up a clean Tableau dashboard faster than unnecessary decimals. When you're showing sales in the millions, nobody needs to see the thirty-five cents. Getting rid of those extra decimal points makes your visuals cleaner, your key performance indicators (KPIs) easier to read, and your overall report more professional. This guide will walk you through several easy methods to remove decimals for good.

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We’ll cover everything from quick formatting changes for a single chart to more permanent solutions using default properties and calculated fields. You'll learn how to control the formatting of your numbers, axes, and labels precisely.

The Quickest Fix: Standard Number Formatting

The most straightforward way to hide decimals is by changing the format of the measure directly on your worksheet. This method is perfect for one-off adjustments and affects how the number is displayed in your chart or table without changing the underlying data.

Let's say you have a bar chart showing Sales by Region. By default, Tableau might display the sales figures with two decimal places, like $424,252.34. Here’s how to clean that up:

1. Drag your measure (e.g., Sales) onto the Rows or Columns shelf and your dimension (e.g., Region) onto the other.
2. Right-click the green measure pill in your worksheet. It might say SUM(Sales).
3. From the context menu, select Format...

A "Format" pane will open on the left side of your screen. From here, you can customize the appearance.

1. In the Format pane, make sure you are on the Pane tab (or Header tab, depending on your chart setup). If you can't see the numbers section, click on the SUM(Sales) dropdown in the styling menu section to make sure it's formatting for the correct field.
2. Under the "Default" section, click the Numbers dropdown menu.
3. Choose Number (Custom).
4. In the "Decimal places" input box, change the number to 0 and press Enter.

Instantly, all the numbers in your view will update to whole numbers. The tooltips, labels, and figures in the table will all be displayed without decimals. This approach is quick, non-destructive, and perfect for cleaning up a specific visualization.

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For a More Permanent Change: Set the Default Properties

If you find yourself constantly removing decimals from the same measure every time you create a new worksheet, you can save a lot of time by changing its default properties. This tells Tableau to always display that specific measure as a whole number unless you decide to override it later.

This is extremely useful for metrics that should never have decimal places, like inventory counts, customer counts, or page views.

Here’s how to set it up:

1. In the Data pane on the left, find the measure you want to modify (e.g., Sales).
2. Right-click on the measure's name.
3. Hover over Default Properties in the menu.
4. Select Number Format... from the sub-menu.
5. A new dialog box will appear. In this window, select Number (Custom).
6. Set the Decimal places to 0. You can also configure other default settings here, like adding a currency symbol ($) or a thousands separator (,).
7. Click OK.

Now, every time you drag that Sales measure into a new sheet or a new chart, it will automatically appear as a whole number. This keeps your reporting consistent and saves you from having to repeat the formatting steps over and over again.

Using Calculated Fields for Total Control

Sometimes, simple formatting isn’t enough. You might need to perform a calculation that requires an integer, or you might want to truncate numbers instead of rounding them. This is where calculated fields come in. Tableau offers several functions to manipulate numbers at the data level.

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Rounding Numbers with the ROUND() Function

The ROUND() function rounds a number to a specified number of decimal places. To remove all decimals, you round it to zero places. This is useful when you want to convert a value to a whole number based on standard rounding rules (0.5 and up rounds up).

To use it, create a new calculated field:

1. Go to Analysis > Create Calculated Field.
2. Give your new field a name, like "Rounded Sales."
3. Enter the following formula:

ROUND([Sales], 0)

1. Click OK.

Now you have a new measure called "Rounded Sales" in your Data pane. When you use this field, any value like 150.78 becomes 151, and 150.49 becomes 150.. This function permanently alters the value within the calculation, which is different from just changing the display format.

Truncating Numbers with the INT() Function

What if you don't want to round? What if you just want to chop off the decimal part entirely? For that, you can use the INT() function. This function converts a number into an integer by simply discarding everything after the decimal point.

Create another calculated field:

1. Give the field a name, like "Integer Order Quantity."
2. Enter the following formula:

INT([Order Quantity])

1. Click OK.

With this function, a value of 99.99 becomes 99. It doesn’t round up. It doesn't matter how close the decimal is to the next whole number, INT() will always truncate towards zero. This is valuable for scenarios where fractions cannot exist, and you simply need the whole number part of a value.

How to Remove Decimals from a Chart Axis

Sometimes your chart bars or marks and their labels look perfect, but the axis labels still show annoying decimals (e.g., $50.00K, $100.00K). Formatting an axis is a separate step, giving you granular control over your visualization's appearance.

Here’s how to fix it:

1. In your worksheet view, find the axis you want to edit (e.g., the Y-axis showing sales values).
2. Right-click directly on the axis.
3. Select Format... from the menu.
4. The Format pane will open on the left, automatically set to the Axis tab.
5. Under the "Scale" section, click the Numbers dropdown.
6. Just like before, choose Number (Custom) and set the Decimal places to 0.

Your axis will instantly reformat to show clean, whole numbers, making your chart much easier to read at a glance without affecting the number formatting in your tooltips or data labels elsewhere.

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Best Practices: When to Remove Decimals (and When to Keep Them)

Getting rid of decimals cleans up your dashboards, but it's not always the right move. The key is to present data in a way that is both accurate and easily digestible. Here are some guidelines.

You should probably remove decimals when:

• Dealing with big numbers. When you’re reporting revenue in the hundreds of thousands or millions, cents are just noise. Removing them helps your audience focus on the numbers that matter.
• Counting whole items. You can't have half a customer or sell 10.7 units of a product. If you're displaying counts of discrete items, always use integers. Be careful if you are showing an average, however!
• For top-level KPIs. On a summary dashboard, high-level metrics like "Total Visits" or "Items Sold" are meant to be understood instantly. Whole numbers are best for this job.

You should consider keeping decimals when:

• Working with precise metrics. Financial data like currency exchange rates, statistical metrics, or scientific measurements often require high precision. Removing decimals could remove critical information.
• Showing averages. The average order value might be $52.83, and that detail is often more insightful than rounding to $53. An average number of items per order might be 2.3, and that decimal is important context.
• Displaying percentages and ratios. Small changes can be significant. The difference between a 2.1% conversion rate and a 2.8% conversion rate is huge. Rounding them both to 2% or 3% would hide the nuance. In these cases, it's common practice to keep one or two decimal places.

Final Thoughts

You now have a complete toolkit for managing decimals in Tableau. Whether you need a quick formatting fix for a specific chart, a permanent default setting for a common metric, or precise control with a calculated field, you can ensure your numbers are always presented clearly and professionally. Mastering these small touches is what separates a good dashboard from a great one.

While mastering tools like Tableau is a powerful skill, sometimes you just need to get answers from your data without wrestling with formatting menus and calculation syntax. We built Graphed to solve this by letting you create dashboards and get insights using simple, natural language. Instead of clicking through menus, you can just ask, "Show me last quarter's sales by country without any decimals." Our AI data analyst handles the visualizations and formatting for you, delivering clean, real-time reports in seconds.