Craig, I noticed your question wasn't answered. The $ sign is not required because it is in front of the 2000, not somewhere in the middle, like this: 20$00. If you look in the Match box, it says Any Part of Field. That means it is only looking for the numbers 2000 in that specific order anywhere within the field. It will find 2000 in a field that contains $2000. Another example, when Any Part of Field is set, then searching for "the" would find it in fields that contain "Cat in the hat", "the raven", "other man" and "the".  All of those values contain the sequence "the" somewhere. If, however, the search is set for Whole Field, it would find in only the last of those four, not in the other three.