How should 4 decimals places behave, being simple yet powerful

Question

I have a UI question that troubled me on the best method to handle 4 decimal places for prices.

In an table already cramped full of data, I would want to simplified the interface to make it not so cluttered. The actual current UI is shown below.

http://i41.tinypic.com/bg5tub.jpg

The problem is, for a unit price/units/D.Price and Dis.(Discount) to have 4 decimal places ($0.3459) is quite rare but it still happens (5 in 100 entries). This will result a lot of junk decimal places, cluttering up the interface.

What is the best solution to this problem? In short, I want to declutter it yet maintain the precision. Note: This is web app

Answer 1

I would suggest rendering the numbers without more than one suffixed zero. To not lose precision, you annot just cut off all zeros. However, when removing multiple ending zeros, the precision is maintained while the user don't have to look at all those zeros.

4.350
2.3412
1.3352
3.30
5.0

Answer 2

1454.12
   1.95
  85.3955
 122.11
  50.0

Keep prices aligned by decimal-separator (dot or comma). Remove trailing zeros.

Answer 3

The important thing is to keep the decimal point aligned, in my opinion. If you can do this and drop the trailing decimals you will reduce the visual clutter. If you can't, then I would prefer to keep them padded with zeros rather than have the decimal points not line up. Rounding to 2 decimal places (in the list) may be acceptable in your application as long as the actual price is correct and you have the ability to view the full price/discount in some sort of details view.

Answer 4

There are these options:

1. You need a special renderer that works like the decimal tab stop in word, i.e. something which can align the decimal points of all numbers.

2. If you can't install a special renderer (like in a web browser), you must pad the decimal places with zeroes and right-align the numbers. Since all fonts make sure that all digits have the same width, this will also align the decimal points but the users will have to filter out the additional zero digits.

3. If you can use a non-proportional font, you can pad the numbers with spaces. But NP fonts usually take a lot of screen space.