South Africa decimal separator

Here in South Africa, according to someone, the “official” decimal separator is “,” (comma),
I’ve been in the IT industry over 30 years and never seen a comma being used for the decimal separator, not the shops nor the banks, and even a very large government agency use the “.” dot as the separator.
IMO the so called official standard needs to be changed, but that certainly is not going to change in a long time,
So as they say about standards “The beauty of standards is that there are so many to choose from”
I have adjusted my linux en_ZA.utf8 locale to match what i would like,
thousands separator a space
currency symbol is a R
numeric separator (LC_NUMERIC decimal_point) is a “.” a dot
LC_MONETARY
currency_symbol is R
mon_decimal_point is “.” a dot
mon_thousands_sep is " " (a space)

Now when use librecalc for some reason it ignores all of this and uses it’s own settings,
My question is how do i get librecalc to use the system locale like i set. (I have tried to change the options on the languages and locales but I just dont get it correctly.
essentially i need to override the comma decimal separator and use a dot .
As more people move over to libre this is going to become a larger issue, already a few South Africans people have complained about this… please dont tell me to contact the authorities as that will never happen.

Which locale do you have chosen in Tools > Options > Languages and Locales?

Currently i have it set as follow, it’s the closest i can get to working,
however if I enter R33.77 (Three rand 77 cents) calc takes this as a text input and not currency (number)
If I change the Locale setting to English (South Africa) then it puts the comma in as a decimal separator, completely ignoring my linux systems default locale as i customized.

User interface: English (South Africa)
Locale setting: English (USA)
Default currency” ZAR R English (South Africa)
Decimal key on the numpad (checked) same as locale setting (.)
Date acceptance patterns: Y-M-D;Y/M/D;M-D;M/D
Default Languages for Documents English (South Africa)

The locale setting determines how text (i.e. user input into a Calc cell) is interpreted, so it can be converted into numeric values.
With locale English(USA), 1/2/2025 enters 2nd of January and numbers with a leading $ will be interpreted as currency entry.

Locale settings of the en-ZA in LibreOffice:

Locale Language Country Decimal Date Time 1000 List Default Date Time
en-ZA English South Africa . / : , ; 25-10-31 20:01

With English (South Africa) as locale, your point decimals are interpreted correctly as decimals. Comma is interpreted as thousands separator.

It is text, because you have entered the unit. To get numbers, you need to enter the value without any unit. Getting the unit R has to be done by the number format. Thus enter 33.77, go to Format > Cell… > Numbers, select category Currency and then the format you want to be displayed.

You should use the local English (South Africa) because the locale not only determines the decimal separator but calendar, date and time formats and sorting rules as well.

Update to LibreOffice version 24.8, see ReleaseNotes/24.8 - The Document Foundation Wiki