Numeric formatting for string data types.

[Cognos10x]

Hi Experts,

I have a report field that I am using it for custom labeling in the charts. This custom labeling is for the tooltips and I have like half a dozen of tooltips for each chart object. Some of the data items are of $amounts or numeric with thousand separator. But since I converted them to varchar to put them in custom label, all the data items looses its formatting.
I can add Cognos function to this but it would be very messy in the end for all the data items.
How can I have the formatting back with data type still keeping as string/varchar.