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FORMATTING FOR DOLLARS

If there's one thing that drives a lot of Excel 97 and 2000 users crazy, it's the way the Formatting toolbar's Currency Style button works. If you teach or support Excel users, here's a lesson that might make you the hero.
What's the deal?
When you select a column of numbers and click the Currency Style button, Excel formats those numbers with dollar signs, all right. But if you right-click any of those cells, choose Format Cells, and click the Number tab, you'll see that Excel has actually applied what's known as Accounting style formatting. In addition, Excel vertically aligns the dollar signs in all the cells.
Not that there's anything wrong with the Accounting style, but it can leave white space between the dollar sign and the first digit. If you don't want the white space, you need to manually apply true Currency formatting instead.
That style displays the values with dollar signs lined up next to the leftmost digit.
After you select the range of cells, you have two options. You can go to Format | Cells | Number and choose Currency from the category list, or you can press [Ctrl][Shift][$].