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Comment by muxxa | Hacker News Reader

Calc still doesn't understand the euro symbol as a currency.

Try pasting in the following:

  €85.00
  €56.00
  €52.00
  €44.00

If you change the cell format to 'currency', it silently quotes the entries making them literal values (the leading tick mark is only visible in the formula box):

  '€85.00
  '€56.00
  '€52.00
  '€44.00

Now it's impossible to treat them as numeric values without doing a weird regex find/replace [1]. This doesn't happen with sterling or pound.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/25764467/6691

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I just tried this and while what you say is true, I found a workaround for the issue. Euros are now treated like numeric values and you get the euro character (€).

(1) Select some _empty_ cells you wish to make euro currency

(2) Right click -> Format Cells

(3) Category should be "Currency"

(4) Format should be "EUR € English (Ireland)"

(5) Save and then enter numbers into the cells (the euro symbol should be appended)

It seems to work with things like sum() and you still get the euro symbol and them being the correct "currency" cell type.

Here's the "Format Code" which you can just paste into the Format Code box to save yourself time with the above procedure:

        [$€-1809]#,##0.00;[RED]-[$€-1809]#,##0.00

No white space around it.

Pasting remains completely broken. They need to fix that.

Well, one of the reasons is that it depends from country and language. I would outright say that your Euro format is wrong. Yet it isn't that simple. I'm used to write 1,23 € and euros work fine if written as 1,23 if I write 1.23 then it's a string. Just strip euro signs and put numbers. There are also plenty of systems which can't handle unicode so using € sign is bad idea. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_issues_concerning_th...

Isn't '£' unicode?

Both £ and € are in ISO8519-15

> I would outright say that your Euro format is wrong

It's not. See: http://publications.europa.eu/code/en/en-370303.htm

I never understood why some countries insist to write currency type before the amount. It is weird and inconsistent among multiple currencies. Would be way better to write every numeric value before its type like in physics, though I suspect physics also may have some strange rules somewhere :) .

Agree. Even the spoken form (at least in the languages I know) is formated this way: You say "ten euros" and not "euros ten". I'd be curious to know why it was decided to write it the other way around.

The prefixed currency symbol makes it trivial to detect attempts to insert digits on the large denomination side.

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