Because automations are so limited in formatting options for email messages, I'm stuck having to create a bunch of extra fields solely to copy specifically formatted other fields and change them to flat text so they'll appear correctly when emails are sent.

Because of this, I'm currently hung up trying to get currency to format properly. I have a formula field that outputs values as a currency into a field that we'll call "Dollar Total", including thousands and decimal separators. I was able to use a concat formula to get the basic copying done, including adding the $ manually at the start, but it doesn't handle decimals properly which then further complicates trying to get a formula to manually insert the thousands separator commas.

For instance, if a value is "$14,500.00" it'll output as "$14,500" but if it's $14,500.80" all I get is "14,500.8". It'll go out as far as I do with numbers after a decimal, but if it's only zeroes it drops them, and then that breaks the manual insertion of the commas based on number placement.

ChatGPT is normally really great at even the most complicated formulas, but it failed to even generate a formula that returned values most of the time, and the one time it did return a value it resulted in broken formatting like "$82763,.83" and "$10236,5.2" and that was with a crazy complex formula.

Any ideas? When I previously contacted support about this ridiculous extra effort needed just to get professional looking emails using already properly formatted values in Airtable, they said "good idea" and that was the gist of it. The answer more and more lately just seems to be "make another field" instead of "we'll fix the obvious issue".