Thanks for responding Owen,
It's about locale based formatting.
$1,234.56
$1,000,009.99
($2,999.00)
where a user would want to quickly perform some transformation steps (but not in steps but rather a single operation):
1. remove the commas
2. apply parentheses around the number for negative amounts
Number formatting for globalization is found in many other applications through customized locale support.
The export from those applications might typically look like this:
$1234.56
$1000009.99
($2999.00)
The above works in the financial world most of the time, but some users might want to customize for easier Analytic tools and DB's such as:
-2999.00
I think having smart defaults that can be overridden and easily customized makes sense from within OpenRefine itself, rather than altering the system locale that OpenRefine runs on.
Users have messy data from around the world, and I'm seeing and hearing about our shortcomings more and more through Wikidata, Commons, and financial groups concerning Numbers and Currencies.
I just thought I'd bring it up for discussion on how we might make this much easier for folks to:
1. not have to change their system locale to work with data coming from another locale source.
2. improve or add a dialog for Number and Currency customization similar to Regional and Language dialogs found natively in OS's that GREL functions (or new functions) and menus could take advantage of users session preferences with locale handling.