Int'l Excel, Decimals

Factual Questions
1

Okay, once more serving the holy cheese people, I got some wonderful data which I dumped into. Now as many of you know, this will be formatted in Euro format, periods as thousand separators, commas as decimal separators.

Now, the new lappytoppy that the drooling IT moron gave me seems not to loaded the tools I need.

That is, this Excel is not recognizing the Euro format. On my old machine I had some options for this, but can’t find it. So, dear SD GQ people, help. Where to find the tools to make this Excel 2000 Office Premium piece of shit recognize euro number format. I know it is possible, but can’t recall what I did in the past (of course I think I was using a Euro version…)

2

I don’t know of a way to limit the editing to Excel or one worksheet in Excel, but you can change your whole puter:

Start >> Settings >> Control Panel >> Regional Options >> General tab

Select the “language(nation)” combination from the drop-down under “Your locale: (location)”

e.g. French (Switzerland) or German (Switzerland)

3

What you need to do is:

First, in the Control Panel, set your input locale to some European country (or just go to the Numbers tab, and set the decimal symbol and the digit grouping symbol as appropriate).

Then, back in Excel, define a custom format for the cells as follows:
[$€-2] #,###.00

  • and that should display them the way you want.
4

Thanks, useful references, but I wanted to avoid the control panel route as I need to keep other references in US terms lest I descend into a real morass. I’ll just write a macro to convert the data.

Now I know my franco-version of Excel professional had some neat function I could do this automatically. Fuckers and their North Americano centric products. And fucking American IT twit who didn’t listen to me.

But thanks anyway.

(I might add that I accidently switched keyboard layouts while seeing if switching languages worked, and then couldn’t figure out for a good minute why I kept getting errors on my password. The joys of multilingual computing. Thank god this machine doesn’t have Arabic like the old one, that was a real mess.)