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Decimal dot or comma in Power Apps

Decimal dot or comma in Power Apps

Decimal dot or comma in Power Apps

By:

Pieter Veenstra

Date:

How do you write 1,234.56? Do you have a decimal dot or a decimal comma? Well most likely this depends on where you live. How do you deal with this in Power Apps?

Decimal dot vs decimal comma

On Reddit someone just asked about how to handle decimal dots and commas. It made me wonder about how do you handle both if you have a mix of users.

Most English speaking countries will write 1,234.56 whereas many other countries would write the same number as 1.234,56.

Decimal dot or decimal comma
Decimal dot or decimal comma

Within Power Apps, I’m going to show you the problem while we run our app in English/United Kingdom.

As you can see the app doesn’t like the , and if I replace the . with a comma the comma will get removed. So this means that we can’t have users in multiple countries.

How do we resolve this in Power Apps?

Setting the Locale settings

So if we have users in a number of different countries then we need to tell our app to use a variation of settings depending on the user.

Power Apps Settings
Power Apps Settings

Make sure that in the Language settings you have selected Use browser language. Now you need to make sure that your browser language is set correctly for every user and your app will then work with both decimal dots and decimal commas.

Set Power Apps to use the browser's language to handle decimal dot and decimal comma
Set Power Apps to use the browser’s language to handle decimal dot and decimal comma

The above settings however only affects how your Power Apps development studio is running. The browser settings however are what really makes the difference.

The browser settings will affect your app in multiple ways.

  • The way decimal dots/commas are handled
  • The way dates are displayed. For example 19/01/2026 vs 01/19/2026

Is your business still running on paper trails, sprawling Excel files, or ageing Access databases? There’s a better way — and I can show you exactly what it looks like. I’m the Technical Director of Vantage 365, a Microsoft solutions consultancy working with clients across the UK, the Netherlands, and worldwide. For over 30 years I’ve been turning messy, manual business processes into clean, automated systems that save time, reduce errors, and give teams the visibility they need to make better decisions. SharePains is not just any blog run by a Microsoft MVP. Have you ever used Try-Catch in Power Automate? The original post about Try-Catch in Power Automate can still be found on this site, https://staging.sharepains.com/2018/02/07/try-catch-finally-in-power-automate-flow/ Or have you ever used the Pieter’s method to avoid variables and speed up your flows? https://staging.sharepains.com/2020/03/11/pieters-method-for-advanced-in-flows/ You can contact me using contact@staging.sharepains.com

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5 responses to “Decimal dot or comma in Power Apps”

  1. Kay Galley Avatar
    Kay Galley

    thank you for this post. This is indeed a major problem with basically the most important app I designed for my company.
    We have an Excel Query that looks up exchange rates (EU / UK / US to CH), and then takes that to calculate the amounts for invoices – so the app is connected to the daily refreshing query, and then taking the base amount. The query already puts out the ex rate with a dot as decimal separator (it comes with a comma).

    Now, with most users, this works, but with some, the app always “ignores” the decimal separator – so, instead of i.e. 0.9876 it calculates fee times 9876…

    I had looked into each team members device settings and also teams, browser whatever settings, and even once spend several hours on the phone with the MS support team.
    So far, could not figure out what the problem was.
    Of course, we are in a multiple speaking country, so our team members use different language settings – some prefer French, others German or English…

    I am trying the approach now and will see if that solves the problem…

    1. Pieter Veenstra Avatar
      Pieter Veenstra

      Please let me know if it works for you.

      1. Kay Galley Avatar
        Kay Galley

        for now, it seems to be the same problem. But it is just for some of our users – again, we have 6 or 7 accounts using the app, all with different devices, device settings, account settings, browsers, browser settings, office settings… as for me everything always works fine, it is difficult to detect where the decimal separator “disappears”… I’m wondering if I can sort of manipulate reading the excel file differently… (i.e. if the value is > 2, replace , by . or so)

      2. Pieter Veenstra Avatar
        Pieter Veenstra

        I’m happy to have a more detailed look on a Teams chat. If you send me a message on the chat then we can discuss further.

  2. Kay Galley Avatar
    Kay Galley

    for now, I basically added a number format (en instad of fr or de) to the value. I hope that works…

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