Accounting Space (97 and on)

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I’ve just resolved a most aggravating user problem by telephone – spurious space characters appearing at the left of a cell.
User entered plain string text in cells.
Some cells appear correctly left-aligned; other cells have an apparent space between the left boundary of the cell and the leftmost character of the string.
The problem cells had been formatted in Accounting format.
Presumably the space is MSoft’s way of telling us there was always the possibility of dropping a currency symbol in there, had MSoft found any numeric characters worth formatting.
But it is Accounting format, not currency.
The dialogue box says that Accounting format aligns decimal points and currency symbols, if any.
Oddly enough, Accounting format WITH a chosen currency symbol still seems to introduce the space.
I can’t think of a good reason for having that space there at all.

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I can’t think of a good reason for having that space there at all.

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Just a matter of taste, I guess, since I really like having that space and format cells to get it (it also shows up in the ‘comma’ formats). It separates text in titles and labels from the cell border when laying out a table, as well as providing a little more space between numeric values and any text in the cell to the right.

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> I really like having that space and format cells to get it
Good point.
The example below shows that I can engineer two spaces, or more, should I choose, but that would mean designing custom formats all over the place (or using Styles, not a bad idea …)
I probably should have said “I can’t think of a good reason for designing it that way, but it’s too late now.
I agree that extra white spaces makes things more readable.

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