Interactive Viewer provides common formats to change how numbers appear. You can, for example, display numbers with or without decimal values, in scientific notation, as a percentage, or as currency with the appropriate symbol. Sometimes, even though a column displays numbers, the data can have a string data type. Postal codes, for example, are frequently stored as string data. Numeric formats do not apply to numbers of string type. To help you understand what format you can apply to a report column, when you select a column for formatting the title of the formatting dialog box identifies the type of data in the column. This section discusses numeric data formats, date‑and‑time formats, and string data formats, and describes how you can apply these formats to data in a report. When you work with merged columns, select each column from the drop‑down list of columns in the merged column, and define a new format each time, based on the column’s data type.

When working with multiple columns containing the same data type, you can use Interactive Viewer to specify a format for the data in one column, and copy the format to other columns. This section also explains how to copy formatting properties.