Negative currency use in Europe

[Dutch]

When formatting currency in a cell in a table in Writer, there are numerous options in the list. However none of those options is the way we Europeans use it for negative amounts. Most standard options in Writer have the minus at the back, behind the amount.

We don’t do that in The Netherlands, we put the minus before the amount. The convention is to have the euro sign, then the minus, then the amount and in black. I believe most of Europe does it like that. Sometimes the minus is before the €-sign.

Example: € -1.586,75.

Oftentimes when the decimals are both 0 those are abbreviated to a minus. like this:€ 1.586,00 becomes € 1.586,-. As you can see, in Europe it could be confusing if the minus was behind the amount.

The option to have the € and the - before the amount is not available in the standard list and has to be constructed in a custom format every time I want to use it in a new file.

Is there a way to add it to the standard options or some other way I can use it in a template?

[ajlittoz]

If your table is numeric (to be understood as opposed to a table of text paragraphs), it looks like a spreadsheet. Have you tried to format this “table” as a spreadsheet in Calc where Format>Cells offer very sophisticated possibilities? You can then insert the spreadsheet as an OLE object in Writer.

[Dutch]

Thank you.
Inserting a spreadsheet sort of negates the simplicity of the solution. I specifically choose LO Writer because it updates Tables real-time. MS Word doesn’t do that.

There is a way to get the format as I wish it, as I tried to explain. In the Table / Number Format / Category / Currency there’s several Formats. Most of them have the minus-sign behind the number.
I guess that’s how it’s done in the States, but there’s quite some bit of world outside the States that does it differently.
To get what I want I need to modify a currency to a user defined format, which is easy when you know how (Writer manual isn’t very clear on that) but needs to be done again for every document I start. Of the 15 currency formats in the list 11 have the minus behind the amount (useless to me) and of the 4 with the - in front, none use the €-sign. Would just be nice if the rest of the world would get acknowledged and have the option of €-sign with - in front in the standard formats.

[ajlittoz]

If you really don’t need complicated computations, i.e. display or addition only, simplistic Writer tables will do.

Your user-defined format in Table>Number Format is as follows:

[$€-40C]# ##0,00;[$€-40C]-# ##0,00

Whether your insert a space between the € sign and the number is up to you. In my locale, the thousand separator is a space, this is why you see it between the #. Replace with your thousand separator (decimal point I assume).

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[Dutch]

Thanks, this works. I wouldn’t have found this by myself. Which does say a lot. Other thing is I will need to do this for every instance I need it. Would be great if it was added to the defaults since I really believe a substantial part of Europe uses this convention.