Windows’ Decimal Point vs Comma Confusion

Windows customizes your PC to suit different regional conventions — for example, in some places commas are used instead of a period to separate the fractional part of decimal numbers. This may pose a problem for certain applications when saving data to file for importing into other programs — e.g. when Touchstone or Clear Waves saves spectrum trace data for import into Shure’s Wireless Workbench (WWB). The WWB program expects the spectrum trace data as a list of , pairs, where and are decimal values. Because of regional differences in how decimal values are represented, then Touchstone or Clear Waves may save the data in this format:
518,000, -104,00
When, in fact, WWB expects the data in this format:
518.000, -104.00

To fix this behavior, there is a regional setting you can change from within Windows’ Control Panel. Go to the Control Panel’s Region and Language settings (as shown below) and for the ‘Decimal symbol’ field select the ‘period’ symbol.