I have been struggling to get my numbers to display PROPERLY with DECIMAL POINTS instead of DECIMAL COMMAS. I eventually discovered that LibreOffice thinks that South Africa uses commas as decimals. South Africa does not use commas as decimals, so I had to change my locale to the wrong locale.
(Whoever attends to this, note also please that South African calendars start on SUNDAY.)
Thanks
Is there consent in South Africa about this? I got my doubts after reading How to correctly format currency in South Africa? | Robert MacLean and links therein.
It seems that I forgot I was not brought up and educated in the country in which I now live. Rhodesia of yore apparently used the decimal point, which I am used to. Whenever I get a new computer, I fly into the settings to make my locale South Africa, force my dates to d-m-y and my numbers to #,##0.00 (and, you’ll be amused, my short-date to dd/mm/yy - 2-digit year - because otherwise my dd mmm yyyy dates end up with slashes, e.g. dd/mmm/yy), so I never noticed how persistent that ghastly comma is until I installed LibreOffice. Since this incident, I’m noticing it everywhere. My life has been a lie.
LibreOffice follows international standards, which may not be the same as an individuals preferences. My understanding is that South Africa technically uses the comma for the Decimal Separator Key. This means that it is not a bug, although it is not your personal choice.
However, can you not ignore the setting and use, what I would call, the normal Decimal Point? On my Linux English (UK) LibreOffice I can choose TOOLS > OPTIONS > LANGUAGE SETTINGS > LANGUAGES > DECIMAL SEPARATOR KEY > (unselect) SAME AS LOCALE SETTING (,) (or (.) depending on locale).
What would that give? The purpose of that setting is to define which symbol is entered when user presses the numpad dot key. If it is the same as locale setting, then it would be normally processed when LO analyses the string to convert it to, say, a number. If it doesn’t match locale separator, LO will not be able to convert it correctly (because its analysis is independent of this setting, and is locale-dependent anyway).
You may well be right. However, on my system you can change the del/decimal delimiter key on the keypad between . and ,. It use to work when I needed to move from English to French settings.