Hi all,
It’s driving me insane, I’m trying out several ideas I read on the topic in various communities but I just can’t get it to work (the formulas tend to get complicated).
So here in this forum you find it actually as a top request…
In the meantime - what is the ultimate hack to convert a number into a European format?
So turning € 3,400.45 into € 3.400,45
Please help me save hours trying to get this figured out.
Thank you so much
Welcome to the community, @Bettina!
Unfortunately, I don’t have any immediate answers for you, and I’m not sure if anybody has ever solved this yet. @Databaser, how have you solved this problem in Europe? I wonder if anybody else in our community has figured out any great solutions to this?
This would be a great project for someone to figure out how to create a formula field that displays European numbers & European currency properly — although it’s important to note that the formula would end up as a text string instead of a number, which would limit its usefulness in other formulas that depend on math.
The real underlying problem here is that Airtable needs to solve this issue on their end. You may want to email support@airtable.com about this, but I’ve emailed them at least 7 times about this issue over the last 5 years, and nothing has been accomplished in terms of international compatibility. I know that many other people have been complaining about this for years as well.
Sorry that I don’t really have much to add here, except for chiming in with my own personal rant about this topic. This is a huge pet peeve for me personally, because I lost 3 Airtable consulting clients in Europe because of Airtable’s inability to fully support countries outside of the USA. So Airtable has actively pulled money out of my pocket because of this issue.
And it’s not just a problem with number fields & currency fields, but it’s also a problem with their date fields & phone number fields & drop-down calendars as well. For example, with their drop-down calendars, Airtable doesn’t even realize that most of the world starts their calendar weeks on Mondays instead of Sundays, so everybody in Europe is stuck looking at calendars that start on Sundays.
Could you imagine the outcry from Airtable employees if their USA calendars started on Mondays instead of Sundays? But they don’t care about pushing that same problem onto the rest of the world.
I believe that the problem here is that Airtable primarily focuses on hiring “young” (i.e. inexperienced) engineers in the USA who have presumably never traveled outside of the USA before. Very few people in the USA have ever left the country, but this is especially a problem amongst the youth. So it seems like the young staff at Airtable have very little concept of other countries outside of the USA.
In my personal opinion, Airtable is not fully usable outside of the USA.
Hello Scott.
Thank you so very much for your extensive reply. Your explanation as to why Airtable hasn’t yet put some focus on this actually makes sense. I have been in contact once with support in order to get import export sorted with CSV files with different encoding, and understanding of commas and dots.
They also didn’t seem very understanding, but we did manage to find a solution. That’s when I learned to convert text to numbers.
I have come across @Kuovonne ’s solution in a forum post. I didn’t have time to follow the rabbit hole and then completely forgot. I will immediately add her extension.
Thanks all, and I’m looking forward to being part of your community in future. I love ai table and learning what all the things are that I can do with it.
Thank you so much! I’ve come across this before, but didn’t have time then to go into it, but will install right away.
