The number field

A number field stores a numeric value and nothing else — quantity in stock, seats, kilograms. Because the column is genuinely numeric, comparisons are numeric too: 9 sorts before 10, and filters like "greater than" mean what they say. In the demo plant shop, In stock on the Plants table is a number field.

Numbers sit right-aligned in the grid, so magnitudes line up by digit.

The options

• Decimals — how many decimal places the grid shows: 0–6, or Auto. Auto displays exactly what was typed. This is display only — the stored value keeps full precision, so a cell showing 1.2 may hold 1.23, and raising Decimals later reveals the digits it was holding all along.
• Separators — show 1,234,567 instead of 1234567. The commas are fixed, not locale-dependent, so a table reads the same on every machine.

While a cell is being edited it shows the raw value — no separators, no rounding — and that raw value is what's stored.

Blank is not zero

An empty number cell holds nothing. It is not 0, and Tabla never pretends otherwise:

• Sorts — ascending puts blanks after every value, descending puts them first. 0 sorts as a value, among the values.
• Summaries — Sum and Average skip blank cells; Average divides by the count of filled cells, not all rows. A column with no values shows a blank summary, not a misleading 0. Filled, Empty, and % filled are there to count the blanks themselves.
• Filters — is less than 5 does not match blank cells. Use is empty / isn't empty to ask about them directly.

The operators: is, is not, is greater than, is at least, is less than, is at most, is empty, isn't empty.

Over the API

A number cell is a JSON number, at full stored precision — the Decimals display cap is not applied:

{ "fields": { "In stock": 12 } }

Writes must be JSON numbers: 12, not "12". A string is refused with Field "In stock" expects a number. — nothing is coerced. Clear with null, and an empty cell reads back as null. See Writing records over the API.

Which number field you actually want

Number is the plain member of a family of five that share one numeric column — currency, percent, rating, and duration are the same storage wearing different presentation. Pick by what the number means; if you picked wrong, changing between them is free and touches no data.

Two cases that shouldn't be numbers at all:

• Identifiers — phone numbers, zip codes, order numbers with leading zeros. A number field stores the value, so 01001 becomes 1001. Use text or the phone field.
• A count of linked records — don't maintain it by hand. A rollup counts them and can't drift.