Format Zeros as Blanks or Dashes in Tableau

By: Eric Parker

Eric Parker lives in Seattle and has been teaching Tableau and Alteryx since 2014. He's helped thousands of students solve their most pressing problems. If you have a question, feel free to reach out to him directly via email. You can also sign up for a Tableau Office Hour to work with him directly!

Having a lot of zeros in a crosstab or highlight table can be clunky and visually overwhelming. Lots of zeros can divert your users' attention away from actual data values because the visual looks cluttered.

If you want your user to focus on values above or below 0, you might want to return those zeros as blanks or dashes instead. Check this video out to learn how you can utilize Tableau's custom number format feature to control how 0s are encoded in your visualizations.

Custom Number Format To Return 0s as Dashes: #,##0;-#,##0;"-"

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