Awful handling of thousands separators

  • You have to manually insert a formula for this necessary function in EACH cell. And then you can’t use that data for column totals or anything else because they are strings. It needs a spreadsheet type implementation so the data can be worked with but displayed with the thousands separator.

    Worthless for those of us who want the user to have a good experience.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Tobias B?thge

    (@tobiasbg)

    Hi,

    I’m really sorry to hear that you are so disappointed. I tried to offer a solution in the thread at https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/tablepress-reference-value-in-another-cell-same-table/ but it seems that you don’t like this. I agree that this is not a super-nice solution, but it’s working. The reason why the formulas don’t work with e.g. a comma in the numbers simply is that the underlying and external PHP library does not work that way. It hands the numbers down to PHP, which — as most programming languages — does not handle thousand separators in numbers that are used in calculations.

    Of course, another approach could be to simply maintain the table in Excel or similar, where you have more formatting options. Then, you could save the table to a CSV file there and import that into TablePress. Your numbers should then be formatted just like in Excel.

    Best wishes,
    Tobias

    Thread Starter caljim

    (@caljim)

    Tobias, I bought wpDataTables because it displays numbers with the thousands separator and totals the columns. The public must see thousands separators and often column balances in data tables.

    I hope you sort this out somehow and I wish you the best, but it is not good that you don’t mention this clearly in the docs so people don’t waste a lot of time with evaluating your software when in the end they can’t use it.

    Plugin Author Tobias B?thge

    (@tobiasbg)

    Hi,

    thanks for your reply, it’s much appreciated! I really hope that wpDataTables can help with your tables then!

    And yes, the Documentation can probably be optimized in many ways, but I’m not sure that I can think of every little thing in advance. You might be expecting a bit too much from a free plugin here. Please also don’t forget that I tried to offer a workaround very quickly. There should also be another approach, which I haven’t tested yet, however:
    You could use a “Custom Command” like

    "columnDefs": [ { "render": jQuery.fn.dataTable.render.number( ',', '.', 2, '$' ), "targets": [ 3 ] } ]

    to format the numbers in the frontend, on the fly. Maybe that could also be a solution.

    All the best!
    Tobias

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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