Converting Currency Formatted Text to Number in Power Query

Quick Answer

The correct sequence -- replace the opening parenthesis with a minus sign, remove the closing parenthesis, remove the thousands-separator comma, and only then change the type to Decimal -- is the answer because each transformation has to happen in an order that keeps the string valid for the step that follows it. Accounting notation uses parentheses to represent negative values, so that has to be converted into something Power Query's numeric parser actually understands, a leading minus sign, before anything else touches the string. The closing parenthesis is just leftover punctuation at that point and needs to be stripped so it doesn't corrupt the value. The comma is a thousands separator that Power Query would otherwise misread as part of the number's structure, so it also has to be removed while the value is still text. Only once the string looks like a clean number, with a proper sign and no stray characters, does converting its data type to Decimal succeed instead of producing an error or nulling out rows. This kind of question is really testing whether you understand that Power Query's Change Type step expects a specific, clean string shape, so whenever a column mixes formatting quirks like parentheses, currency symbols, or separators, resolve every non-numeric character first and treat the type conversion as the final step, not an earlier one.