Formatting Currency

Those who are familiar with the rich formatting features of Excel may long for a way to format numbers in a Word table just as easily. For instance, you may have a column of numbers that you want to format as currency, complete with the dollar sign. Unfortunately, Word does not allow you to do this type of formatting directly.

There is a work-around, however. You can use a field to insert any number you want in any format you want. For instance, let's say you have the number 65.78, and you want it formatted as currency in a particular table cell. All you need to do is follow these steps:

1. Position the insertion point in the table cell where the number will reside.
2. Press Ctrl+F9 to insert a pair of field braces.
3. Type the equal sign, followed by the number (65.78).
4. Type a space, followed by \# and another space. This switch tells Word that you are about to specify the format for the number.
5. Enter the format specification, in quote marks. In this case, you would enter "$#,###.00".
6. Press F9 to collapse the completed field.

You can continue to insert numbers in this way. If you have quite a few of them, you may want to create a macro to automate the process. Entering numbers in this way will not affect your ability to create column totals, as well.

By this point you may be wondering if this is really a workaround worth using. After all, the number in the field is static and it takes a bunch of steps to complete. For me, I would simply type the formatted currency, meaning I would type $65.78 and call it a day. There is one time when you may want to use this approach, however, and that is if you create bookmarks for your amounts and then use this formatting technique with those.

As an example, let's say you have the number 1234.5 in your document. Select the number and define a bookmark to refer to the selection. (Let's say your bookmark is named MyNum.) Now, you would follow these steps as a variation to the steps above:

1. Position the insertion point in the table cell where the number will reside.
2. Press Ctrl+F9 to insert a pair of field braces.
3. Type the equal sign.
4. Press Ctrl+F9 one more time to insert a second pair of field braces.
5. Type "REF MyNum" (without the quote marks).
6. Move the insertion point to the right, just outside the field braces you inserted in step 4.
7. Type a space, followed by \# and another space. This switch tells Word that you are about to specify the format for the number.
8. Enter the format specification, in quote marks. In this case, you would enter "$#,###.00".
9. Press F9 to collapse the completed field.

This compound-field approach can be quite powerful, as you can have a "raw number" defined in one place in your document and have it appear as a formatted number in another place.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (11331) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Formatting Currency.