In Microsoft Excel, you can improve the readability of your dashboards and reports by formatting your revenue numbers to appear in thousands. This allows you to present cleaner numbers and avoid inundating your audience with overlarge numbers. To show your numbers in thousands, highlight them, right-click, and select Format Cells. Excel on Mac saves in the XLSX format by default, but Excel for Mac sometimes hides the file extension, which Windows uses when opening a file. In the Save As dialog box, choose Excel Workbook (.xlsx) as the format and uncheck Hide Extension.
Correction: I found on another forum (which I can't locate again) that both of these Excel 1000 separator procedures work on MacOS X Snow Leopard with Office Mac 2011. BUT only if the MacOS X System Preferences are set in a particular way.
As installed on my Mac Mini they were not compatible. The procedure to set these preferences is as follows. Click the Apple menu, Select System Preferences., Click Language & Text. In the Language Tab Make sure English is selected. In the Formats Tab, make sure the Region is set to United States, NOT United States (computer).
Click the X box If you have an Excel workbook open, you must re-launch Excel to make these settings work. In the Menu bar click Excel and select Quit Excel. Explanation: MacOS X Snow Leopard seems to come installed with the setting of United States (computer), and that turns off the 1000 separator in numbers. So that setting is picked up by Excel Mac 2011 when it launches. The custom format.
#,##0.00 will show two decimal places, with thousands separator. Neither the Format/Cells/Number/check the box procedure or your custom format work on Excel in Office Mac 2011 Version 14.1.2 and didn't work on the original version from the install CD/DVD. The Office Mac 2011 Version 14.1.2 was downloaded when recommended by Software Updates on Mac OS Snow Leopard.
Why aren't other users of Office Mac 2011 complaining about this bug. It's not an obscure feature. Help will be appreciated.