Parentheses for negative numbers in Excel 2011

Microsoft hosts a forum for Office for Mac, please click Office for Mac Product Forums to get there, that is where you should post your question.

It's not, it works fine for my installation of Office for Mac 2011 running OS X 10.10.

After updating to Yosemite I am having the same problem as you are with the negative formatting. I haven't been able to find a solution either. Hopefully there will be an update soon that fixes this issue.

Have either of you updated your licenses of MS Office for Mac. Look under the Help menu in any MS Office for Mac app and select Updates.

I just checked for updates and it said that there were none available.

I appreciate you contacting them. Hopefully they will be able to address the issue shortly.

I have the same problem as you under Yosemite. But my guess is that some people have the issue and others don't because of different language/international settings. Now which are the culprit(s), I do not know.

I also have this issue. Also issue is there using OpenOffice and Yosemite. Both were fine using Mavericks so it must be Yosemite messing things up.

Same issue here with Excel 2011, problem started with the Yosemite installation and was not fixed with 10.10.1 nor the latest Microsoft update.

It's a big problem for accountants!

On the Microsoft forum this gentleman replied with a workaround but it's a hassle to have to do this for each new spreadsheet.

JonathanBuhacoff replied on November 9, 2014

If you go to the dialog shown in Phillip's post and select "Custom" on the left side, you can enter this to get the parenthesis back:

$#,##0;[Red](-$#,##0)

Or this to use square brackets:

$#,##0;[Red]"["-$#,##0"]"

The format means use $#,##0 for positive numbers and use [-$#,##0] in red for negative numbers.

You could remove the hyphen too and just do this:

$#,##0;[Red]"["$#,##0"]"

I hope Apple takes note and pushes a fix for us.

Same issue as the others. Thank you for the workaround jmgathg. Another workaround I found was copying the (negative number) format from another spreadsheet that was created prior to my upgrade. Seemed to work.

+1...same problem.

definitely Yosemite....I did not have this problem until installing the update....can't stand the negative numbers without parentheses....other quirky things have happened to my finder operations, as well.....weird stuff