You might be wondering what it means to remove the dollar sign in Google Sheets. Whether you’re curious about or you know what we’re talking about, this guide is for you.
If you’re using your Google Sheets to work with monetary data—like calculating sales, commissions, income, or expenses as well as stock prices, it makes sense for the numbers to default to monetary values.
However, what if all the numbers have dollar values? Or you’re using another currency? Let’s discuss how to remove dollar sign in google sheets.
Should You Remove Dollar Sign in Google Sheets?
Google Sheets might use $ (dollar) or € (euro) signs as the currency symbol. However, if you don’t want to use one default or another, you might want to edit the currency settings in accordance with your preferences.
Some might remove the dollar sign because it’s an implicit value. You don’t need to see it to know you’re referring to the price, especially if it’s a ledger full of dollar values.
Others might want to remove the sign because even non-dollar values keep getting the dollar sign, which ruins their calculations. The dollar sign can be $ or the USD abbreviation.
How to Remove Dollar Sign in Google Sheets?
Step 1: Let’s open a spreadsheet with monetary value included, specifically ones that use the dollar value. Some sheets default to the U.S. dollar, “USD’, or “$”. Here, we’ve opened an invoice for articles or projects done with their respective prices.
Step 2: Select the column you wish to remove dollar signs from. In this case, you should click Column E because it contains the data for “Price of Article”. Clicking the “E” button selects the whole column, by the way.
Step 3: Go to the menu, click “Format“, select “Number“, and then click on “Automatic” to remove the currency default.
Or in the case of this spreadsheet, the dollar sign for the values on the column are custom currency for the U.S. dollar because the default here is £ or pound sterling.
Step 4: Pressing “Automatic” removes the formatting on the dollar values, thus removing the dollar sign before them. The dollar signs are also removed from “Price Per Set” and “Total Amount Payable” because they’re formulas that make use of the Column E’s data set.
How to Add Dollar Sign in Google Sheets
Step 1: You can use the same method above to remove the dollar values and sign in order to add it back in. Go to the “Format” menu, select “Number“, and then click “US Dollar“.
Again, in this instance, the dollar is a custom currency. This is because of the settings of this particular spreadsheet file. Normally, the dollar is the default currency.
Step 2: Alternately, you can click this toolbar shortcut, which in this spreadsheet is in the pounds sterling sign or £. It’s much easier to change the value of a data set by clicking on that instead of going through the “Format” menu.
How to Change the Default Currency in Google Sheets
Step 1: If you wish to change the default currency on your “Format” menu and your toolbar shortcut for “Format as Currency”, go to the “File” menu and click on “Settings” (the one with the gear icon).
Step 2: On “Settings for this spreadsheet“, go to the locale. The selected locale affects the formatting of your functions, particularly in terms of currency. On this spreadsheet, the locale is “United Kingdom“.
Step 3: Change the locale to “United States” in order to get the USD or U.S. dollar ($) as your “Format as Currency” default instead of the British pound sterling (£). Afterwards, click “Save Settings“.
Step 4: You can now use the “Format as Currency” button or “Format” menu method to turn your data set into dollars as the default currency.
Here you can see the default “Currency” is dollars instead of pounds thanks to the settings change.
The “Format as Currency” button has also changed from “£” to “$” for good measure.
The Final Score
There’s more than one way to skin a cat or remove the dollar sign on a monetary spreadsheet or a sheet that uses currency data.
The methods shown on this guide can be applied to other currency types, from pesos to euros. Some might use “Find and Replace”, but if the spreadsheet has formatted a column as all dollars, the method won’t work in removing dollar signs.
References:
- “GoogleFinance – Remove USD Symbol“, StackOverflow.com, March 11, 2016
- “Format numbers in a spreadsheet“, Google.com Support, Retrieved June 15, 2022
- “How to Remove Dollar Sign ($ or USD) in Google Sheets?“, SpreadsheetPoint.com, Retrieved June 15, 2022
- “How to Add or Remove Dollar Sign in Google Sheets“, Modern School Bus, Retrieved June 15, 2022