to_excel() float_format to accept this format string?

[finoptimal-dev]

I want to have thousands separators in Excel, but when I pass float_format="%,.2f" in I get an unsupported character error. I also tried "{0:,}". Am I missing something or is this unsupported?

[TomAugspurger]

As far as I know the new style formatters aren't accepted as float formatters (see #4668). Is there a way to specify the thousands separator with old style string formatting? "%,.2f" has Python raising a ValueError, not pandas.

Also Excel may have additional issues. IIRC they store everything as floats and apply formatting to them in excel, but I could be wrong.

[jtratner]

This is a Python issue, not an Excel issue:

In [1]: '%,.2f' % 1000
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ValueError                                Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-1-fa27f61d10d9> in <module>()
----> 1 '%,.2f' % 1000

ValueError: unsupported format character ',' (0x2c) at index 1

So it's not really possible to do this for any output format. (but you can convert it yourself beforehand)

[jreback]

closing as stale. pls reopen if still an issue.