Tuesday, April 09, 2013

Excel 2010 defaults to British pounds for currency under Windows 8 Pro upgrade which should be the dollar symbol in Australia

Sometimes I just have to shake my head with Microsoft. Today I copied some data into a new spreadsheet in Excel 2010 and went to format the numbers so they were dollar amounts. Much to my surprise, clicking on the currency button inserted a pound symbol.

After all these years of getting regional settings wrong Microsoft again gets it wrong with the Windows 8 Pro upgrade. The machine I have has been running on Windows 7 with Office 2010 without this issue. I then took some time to work out what I'd consider to be the best approach to fixing this problem. There are usually a number of approaches and often the best approach isn't terribly obvious. (Who would have thought you'd need to set three settings in different places in Windows XP to get the language setting correct for Australia.) If my experience is typical for those who upgrade, then many people will find themselves in the same position and waste time trying to locate the setting, or worse, end up applying a fudge just to get around the problem. Those who don't take the time to find the correct setting will end up wasting time making many small changes and make their spreadsheets more difficult to maintain.

I've written the solution to this problem in MyAnswers solution 2335. Click
here to obtain the solution.

Kelvin Eldridge
Online Connections
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 for computer support.
Servicing Templestowe, Doncaster, Eltham and the surrounding area.

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