Publisher tables: accounts: right justify without suppressing trailing space

[FredB]

[Publisher 1.9.2.1035, Windows10]

I have to set some accounts tables (SOFA and Balance sheets). The convention is that negative amounts are in parens, positive without. The entries should be aligned right in their cells, but in order to get the actual figures to line up I need a space following the positive numbers (a space the size of the right paren, of course). However, I cannot see how to achieve this. Any kind of space I insert after the last digit is suppressed by the right-alignment.

It was no problem in Pageplus ... I could work round by getting Pageplus to emit a PDF/EPS of these tables, but that's not a viable long-term solution.

[lacerto]

(...)

[sfriedberg]

I am too lazy to check, as I use decimal alignment in such cases, but does optical justification help with the "hanging" right parenthesis?

[lacerto]

(...)

[FredB]

Thanks: optical alignment does the trick.

I can't use tabs: the data is imported from Excel and comes in with no included tabs. I can't type tabs into 65 rows of 8 columns of figures without risking accidental alterations.

There are, of course, only ten negative numbers in the whole lot!

[Old Bruce]

2 hours ago, FredB said:

There are, of course, only ten negative numbers in the whole lot!

Sounds like a good year.

Serious now, you could try adding some string of oddball characters to the Excel cell like _*_ instead of tabs and then do a find and replace in Publisher.