excel numbers

Hi, I need to use numbers in Brazil's format (points for thousands, commas for decimal). Already changed the system preferences for Brazil, it appears ok there. But excel continues to show as american. What to do??

Change it in Excel Preferences. The system-wide setting is being ignored by Excel.

There is no option to change this in Excel preferences, or I couldn't find it. thx

You can't change it that way. Whenever OS X is installed it asks for language preference and locale. At that time, you type in Portuguese and specify Brazil rather than Portugal. Then you can tell the system to use Brazilian numbers, time - date, etc. After that, the numbers should display with the correct decimal annotation. Changing an English version of OS X by specifying a different language will not work.

(Also.... the version of MS Office for Mac you install has to be the Brazilian version.)

Ok, but once I already have it installed, what should I do??

I don't think there is anything you can do to change it now. At least I don't know of a way to do it. But you can ask in the Microsoft Office forums to see if someone there knows of a way. Here is the LINK

I thought that changing the formatting in Excel using Format>Cell then choosing one of the currency option would do the trick. Seems logical but that does not seem to work. In fact, other than changing the abbreviation in the cell before the entry it seems to have little or no effect.

Microsoft in their wisdom do not supply a way for Mac Office (English version) to comply with numbers and grammar requirements of other languages even when the language is changed in OS X. What's frustrating about this is that they do in Windows when you buy the additional language packs. The deluxe or Pro versions of Windows 7 and 8 come with an option to download the language packs for free from MS. No such option for us poor Mac users.