Commas vs Decimals for numbers over 3 digits

[kkenna3]

Hi, in the typography guidelines for numbers I saw the recommendation was "Use commas in values greater than 999."
However, commas and decimals are used differently regionally. We're working on a dashboard with data that will often be in the thousands or higher. My first suggestion before reading the guidelines was not to use any separator (ie. 1000), but should we use a different approach?

[TwilioPasteBot]

Disclaimer: This is a very experimental bot using OpenAI's GPT-4. The answers may not be correct, a human will review the answer and update it if necessary.

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In the typography guidelines for numbers provided by Paste, it is recommended to "Use commas in values greater than 999." This guideline suggests that for values in the thousands or higher, you should use commas as separators to enhance readability. For example, you should format 1000 as 1,000.

However, you've raised a valid point regarding regional differences in the use of commas and decimals. The guidelines do not explicitly address this issue, so if you're working on a dashboard that will be used internationally, it might be worth considering these regional differences.

Since the documentation does not provide a specific alternative for handling numbers in regions with different conventions, and I must adhere to the information given in the provided sections, I recommend following the general guideline of using commas for values greater than 999 but also suggest being mindful of your audience. If your product is intended for a global audience, you might want to explore additional formatting options based on the user's locale or provide user settings that allow for customization of number formats.

Sorry, I don't have a more specific solution to offer based on the guidelines provided.

I also did a search, and I managed to find these other Discussions that might be similar or related to your question. Give them a read to see if they answer your question. If they do, head back here and update this discussion and mark it as answered, pointing others to the related discussion:

• Preventing incorrect characters vs. showing an error state - Answer (updated: 07/20/2022, similarity score: 84%)
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• Input type=number data validation (updated: 07/06/2022, similarity score: 83%)

[dosubot[bot]]

Yes, you should use commas as separators for numbers over 999 in your dashboard. According to the style standards in the Paste design system, it states: "Use commas in values greater than 999." This guideline is part of the Twilio product style guide, which suggests using commas for clarity and consistency in numerical values ^[1].

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[mma1504]

I'd say this argues for updating the guidelines to account for use cases like this. I'd agree we shouldn't use commas if that could change the meaning of the number for folks using Twilio in other regions. I don't know how easy it is to automatically format numbers for particular regions, but that's the only other solution coming to mind beyond avoiding commas altogether...

[kkenna3]

Thanks! As this is a near-term small-scale release, we'll use no separator at all and see if there are issues that justify region-specific implementation

[nkrantz]

Hey @kkenna3! As Megan said, removing delimiters would be the quickest solution, but could potentially be confusing to read depending on the length of the numbers you're displaying. Thanks for pointing out that our number guidance isn't scalable for other regions. I'm going to make a ticket for us to update that and recommend using the Javascript Intl.NumberFormat for displaying the correct number format based on location.

[kkenna3]

Thanks! I'll pass this along