This is just a quick tip for Mac OS X users who might want the symbol “$” to represent their dollar, rather than the US dollar.

I’ve been working on expense reports with Numbers.app and I noticed that my laptop was formatting Canadian and US dollars as “Can$” and “$”, respectively. While I thought this a tad US-centric, that didn’t bother me much, so I gave it no real thought until I opened the same spreadsheet on my Mac Mini, where I saw “$” and “US$” instead. I thought this was neat, except of course that now the columns were the wrong width. I saw the difference, figured there was a difference in the International settings, but no! To quote Swiss chess master Gereben, “wie ist es möglich?!” The settings are the same, and yet one window has “Can$” and the other “$”. There is no “Customize…” button, so I can’t change the number format. What can I do?

I did what any self-respecting programmer would do: I played around with the settings until it worked. I found out that by switching the currency to something else, then back to Canadian Dollar, I reset the number formatting, and now both computers use “$” for real dollars and “US$” for the fake kind.

Now you know.