While establishing local variables for a dashboard with large-scale numbers, I’m finding that the value field does not support “,” (commas) as a character. This makes numbers beyond 3 digits much harder to read at a glance. It also breaks stylistic choices for typographic reasons.
One solution that comes to mind is to have a global style mode for whether commas are auto-placed in numeric strings, either at the local variable stage for numbers or in type-setting options. This would reduce work on the user’s end for having to manually place every comma, and also ensure consistency from a calculation standpoint (so that Figma has an accurate number to reference in equations).
I don’t really see this as a feature request, though, as it’s an integral part of how numbers are displayed. Much like having punctuation or capital letters in writing; it should be natively part of it.
For further clarity and transparency, anything that the team knows isn’t the current expected behavior is internally referred to as a feature request, because a change needs to be made on our end. This is opposed to a bug, which is not our team’s expected behavior that needs to be fixed.
+1 on this — it’s critical for prototyping and usability testing for us. We deal in loyalty points balances into the millions. Not being able to style with commas for readability is currently limiting.
This would be really great as a format option similar to, shudder, Excel — my initial thought was it would be great to set it as a style at the element level, but that’s probably unnecessary for most text elements, so it could be best at the variable level. Either on the number variable or if we could create pseudo-string variables mapped to the number variable and apply a number format that way.
Beyond comma separation, it’d be great to have more Excel-like number formatting options in general. Something like Google Sheets’ time formatting options would let us calculate dates dynamically in prototypes as well as use the same value to show full dates in some part of the interface and abbreviations in another.
I personally would want the ability to set a default display format at the variable-table level (“Format” could be a property unique to number variables) as well as have the ability to override those formats on the canvas (via styles?)
(e.g. I enter a value of “61.23” for a number variable, set that variable’s default number format to display it “61.23%”, then have a style override that lets me display the value as “0.6123” in a specific page template)
Hi @Kim_G, Thanks for sharing your thoughts about number variable! I understand how it would be handy for you.
I found the other community member asking for something similar here. So I merged your post to have all the feedback in one place!
Feel free to vote here!
Having comma or any kind of number formatting support feels pretty critical in order for number variables to be useful. I landed here in this thread because I am having the exact same issue as many in this thread…I am using numbers in my design that are routinely 6 digits. The design has comma formatting, like 832,167, but I can’t wire these into number variables because the number variable will turn it into 832167.
One way of addressing could be a “number formatting style” in the text box paramters, similar to how auto-truncation with ellipsis works. If number formatting is turned on, you select a localization format, e.g. en-US, en-UK, de-DE, etc., and then it attempts to parse the value of the text box as a number and format accordingly.
I’m having the same difficulty. This is making it impossible to use Figma for usability testing with prototyping, especially for financial products. Is there a deadline for correcting this technical debt?
Keeping this one alive because this is a great additional feature, and something we need especially when using methods to calculate dynamic values for variables.
