As suggested by @linqu you should not change your data for presentation. Since pandas 0.17.1, (conditional) formatting was made easier. Quoting the documentation:
You can apply conditional formatting, the visual styling of a
DataFrame
depending on the data within, by using theDataFrame.style
property. This is a property that returns apandas.Styler
object, which has useful methods for formatting and displayingDataFrames
.
For your example, that would be (the usual table will show up in Jupyter):
df.style.format({
'var1': '{:,.2f}'.format,
'var2': '{:,.2f}'.format,
'var3': '{:,.2%}'.format,
})