EDATSLATE

Settings & Preferences

Where you control how Slate displays numbers, not just your account details, worth a proper look since the defaults aren't arbitrary.

The six settings tabs

  • Profile

    Your name, email, avatar and personal details.

  • Preferences

    Appearance, units and number formatting, covered below.

  • Notifications

    What you get notified about.

  • Security

    Password and session management.

  • Members

    Who has access to your organisation.

  • Permissions

    What each role can do.

Appearance

Light, Dark, or System, switches the whole app's theme.

Default Emission Unit

Choose MTCO2e (metric tons), tCO2e (tonnes), or kgCO2e (kilograms). This changes how every emissions figure across the app is displayed, dashboard KPIs included.

Number Format

This is the one setting worth actually understanding, not just picking blindly. Slate deals in numbers that range from single digits to values with five or six leading zeros (a trace gas emission, for instance), and how you format that matters for whether the number is even readable.

  • Engineering (default)

    Everyday values read as ordinary numbers (200, 0.6, 1,234.57). Very small values (below 0.001) and very large ones (a million and up) switch to E-notation with the exponent a multiple of 3, as engineers write them.

  • Standard

    Conventional scientific notation with a unicode-formatted exponent, any exponent, not just multiples of 3.

  • Plain

    Ordinary grouped decimal notation, no exponents at all.

The same figure, three ways

Take a small EPA WARM result, 0.000025 MTCO2e:

  • Engineering

    25.000E-6

  • Standard

    2.50 × 10⁻⁵

  • Plain

    0.0000

Note

Plain formatting genuinely loses this number, it rounds to zero at four decimal places. That's a real, known tradeoff of the Plain option, not a bug, it's why Engineering is the default rather than the more familiar-looking Plain format. If your work regularly involves very small quantities, keep Engineering or Standard selected.

Compact tables

A single checkbox under Display that reduces row padding across data tables, useful if you're working through a lot of records and want more of them on screen at once.