Display Scientific Notation

I'm looking for how to display a value in scientific notation. From my <snmp-device-display>, I tried:

\b5\BER:\p0g\Low Warning: \u7m\${chartable: #.#: $LowBERWarning}\p0\

...but that's not it. Can it be as simple as defining how to display the value, or will I have to script a method to reconstruct the numeric value "280000000" into a text representation of "2.8E-08" for example?

So, I figured out how to get scientific notation. Here's the example:

\b5\BER:\p0g\Low Warning: \u7m\$LowBERWarning \p0\(${chartable: "%1.1e" : $LowBERWarning/100000000000})\p0\

While I had to divide my value by a hundred billion to get the expression to display what I wanted, the thing I haven't figured out yet is how to apply a format without making it chartable. I want my defined color, but since it's chartable, it's blue anyway.