I am preparing a document with Numbers on my laptop. I need to include a dollar sign for each amount, but the dollar sign gets dropped when I enter it.

What FoxFifth said, then…

Enter your currency values as numbers. Include the decimal when needed, but do not include the dollar sign—Numbers will automatically enter the currency sign that you chose when setting the cells' data format as Currency.

Setting the data format to Currency will also make the decimal setting 2 (digits after the decimal). You can change this if needed.

Note that when entering numbers you will need to include the decimal point and the decimal part of the number.

Regards,

Barry

Select the cells (or columns), click Cell at the top of the sidebar, change Data Format to Currency.

In the Numbers formatting interface (the panel at the right) it looks like this:

SG