Ventura change decimal separator ?!?!

Just had the same problem - didn't think the answers here are the best solution for me so I searched by myself: Now Excel has the option to define the decimal separator and the thousands separator. Just do that:

1. Go to Preferences (under Excel or with ⌘ , )
2. Click on 'Edit'.
3. Choose your preferred decimal separator (does it then automatically for the whole document)

For me the clean solution, no more messing around with language settings or command line solutions (even though quite cool).

Be careful with the Terminal command!

After sending a custom formatting command on macOS 13.2, the Language & Region settings became disabled: it can't be open anymore (clicking on the Language & Region button doesn't do anything).

I sent this command (as I wanted dot for decimal and nothing for grouping, which setting is missing on Ventura):

defaults write -g AppleICUNumberSymbols -dict 0 '.' 1 '' 10 '.' 17 ''

Like I mentioned, it disabled the Language & Region settings (and didn't change the numbers format in the system anyway).

Sending other commands after this with different formats didn't make a difference.

Yes that's a serious drawback of Ventura! You can still contact Apple Support and make sure they file a feedbacks, do it directly using the link below and filling one using Feedback Assistant if you can.

Feedback - macOS - Apple

If enough people file something, maybe it will get to the engineer's attention, even though we should not have to do this in the first place for such a major serious issue to being addressed...

Thank you very much for the effective but partial tip.

It works for:

• the DECIMAL separator where you can input a dot
• but for the THOUSANDS separator, it doesn't let me put anything (I wanted a comma) :(

Does it let you?

Go to "General" -> "Language and Region". You will be allowed to select your favorite language and below that you can select the Region. In my case I have Italian as my favorite language, but the Region (Zona) is set to United States. If you set your Region to United States, it will give you an option for the numbers format to choose the decimal separator that you prefer, see the screenshot below:

It looks like it's called "Number Format" now, in General > Language & Region.

It appeared after I changed Region, and it stayed visible after switching back to my original region. I'm not sure if this is expected behavior…

I'm in the Netherlands. I tried this trick. I switched region go America->Canada. That gave me the option to change the number format, but when I returned the region to The Netherlands, the number format disappeared. So this is not the proper solution. My primary language is Dutch.

MaximusAT wrote:

The Terminal workaround worked for me, but this is something absolutely crazy that can break thousands of excel files...how could Apple let this happen?!

FWIW, it will not break thousands of excel files, because excel is smart enough to store the data in a format that is independent of how numbers are displayed. It just so happens that they may not show the same way - and, of course, it matters when you enter new data into them.

That said, of course this needs to be fixed.

At the moment, I do see the option to change number format, but yesterday I am pretty sure it wasn't there... something is clearly wrong.

I had to add Numbers to the applications exception list at the bottom & then choose a different country for that app that would give me decimal points instead of commas. My system is normally on French (Canada) so I added English (UK) for Numbers.

If you are a Keyboard Maestro user you can easily overcome this limitation by using the "Insert Date" action and changing the default formatting to:

%ICUDateTime%MM.dd.yy%

This will yield a date of:

12.02.22

Modify, if you wish, to make it a four-digit date along the lines of:

%ICUDateTime%MM.dd.yyyy%

Which will yield today's date as:

12.02.2022

You can change the separators to whatever you prefer; as you can see I prefer the dots instead of slashes.

cspkloof wrote:

How do you force Excel to run in English?

By default, applications (if coded properly) follow the system setting.

You can change the language for specific applications, though.

Go to System Settings->Language & Region.

At the bottom, you see "Applications". Click the + sign to add an application and select the language you want to use it with.

Thank you, Jean-Francois,

I changed the format back to decimal comma and space for the thousands, but I would prefer to use halve space as used by the Système Internationale and actually also official in Germany and other European countries.

Does anyone know how to use the Terminal workaround to set the grouping separator to a space? The obvious solution

defaults write .GlobalPreferences AppleICUNumberSymbols -dict 0 "." 1 " " 10 "." 17 " "

produces the error "defaults[83767:7029208] Unexpected argument .; leaving defaults unchanged."

Vollschaaf wrote:

The obvious solution

defaults write .GlobalPreferences AppleICUNumberSymbols -dict 0 "." 1 " " 10 "." 17 " "

produces the error "defaults[83767:7029208] Unexpected argument .; leaving defaults unchanged."

I wonder if space in that command needs to be encoded somehow, like "\ "