Many MacOS users around the world want to change the decimal separator from a comma to a dot (period), or vice versa. Like many other fun and intuitive changes to MacOS System Settings in Ventura, where and how you change number formats and decimal separators has changed as well.
Whatever your Language & Region settings and whether or not you’re in the USA, Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Indonesia, Nigeria, or where ever else on planet Earth, here’s how you can change the number format and decimal separator in MacOS Ventura.
Changing Decimal Separator & Number Format in MacOS Ventura
- Go to the Apple menu and choose “System Settings”
- Go to “General”
- Select “Language & Region”
- Locate “Number format” and pulldown the submenu next to that to access the various number format options, allowing you to change the decimal separator to commas, dots, or spaces
Choose the number format you desire, and the setting should carry throughout MacOS instantly.
Missing “Number Format” in MacOS Ventura System Settings?
Some Mac users using different region settings have discovered that the Number Format section is missing from their MacOS Ventura System Settings, which is either a serious oversight or a lovely bug. In any case, if you find yourself missing the Number Format dropdown menu, you can also set the decimal separator from the command line of MacOS.
To do this, open the Terminal application to get started.
For example, the following defaults command will place a “.” dot as the decimal separator, and “‘” apostrophe as the grouping separator:
defaults write .GlobalPreferences AppleICUNumberSymbols -dict 0 "." 1 "'" 10 "." 17 "'"
This workaround comes to us via Microsoft support, where users may be interested in changing the decimal symbol for Microsoft Office Excel and Word on the Mac with macOS Ventura.
Were you able to change the number format and decimal separator to your desired choice on MacOS? Which method did you use? Let us know in the comments.
