Flagging Incorrect Commas in Numbers

In the reports that Michael prepares, he needs to separate numbers by thousands using commas. He wonders if there is a way to make Word "flag" numbers that have the comma in the wrong place, such as 100,00 or 20,0000.

There is no way to do this automatically within Word. While it might seem that this is something that might be "checkable" by grammar checking, it is not. (I suspect this has to do with the fact that how delimiters like commas are used in numbers can vary wildly based on regional settings in Word.)

One thing you could do is to use the Find and Replace feature in Word to look for incorrect placement of the comma. This can be done with a wild card search, which means that you need to press Ctrl+H and then display the Find tab of the resulting dialog box. Display the options and then make sure the Use Wildcards check box is selected. Here is what you should search for:

(,)([0-9]{1,2})([ .\!\?])

This search pattern looks for thousands groups that are too short, as in 100,00. It looks for a comma followed by either one or two digits and, finally, a space, period, exclamation mark, or question mark.

If you want to search for something that has too many zeroes (such as 20,0000), then you can use the following pattern:

([0-9]{4,})([, .\!\?])

This searches for four or more digits followed by a comma, space, period, exclamation mark, or question mark.

Obviously these two search patterns can be adjusted to better fit the nature of your documents, but they do provide a starting point. For instance, I used earlier in this tip an invalid number surrounded by parentheses (such as 20,0000). The second search pattern won't find this instance because it does look for instances where the number is followed by a closing paren. If you have such numbers in your document, you could adjust the pattern accordingly. Or, you could take a different approach and look for a comma followed by four or more digits:

(,)([0-9]{4,})

Again, the idea is to look at what you have in your document and then develop a search pattern that fits the nature of what you find.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (10145) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365.