Formatting Cells Containing Numbers

Numerical data plays a central role in Excel workbooks; therefore, it stands to reason that you have lots of options for choosing how you want your numbers to appear. Two frequently used formats are the Accounting number style, which displays a cell’s contents as a monetary value, and Percent, which multiplies a value by 100 and adds a percent sign to the end. The two biggest benefits of formatting data as a percent are that you save a lot of time (and avoid mistakes) by not typing the decimal point or percent sign yourself and that you can tell the values are percentages at a glance.

Two other options for formatting your numbers are to display the values in a cell with commas every third digit and to increase or decrease the number of digits to the right of the decimal point. Although two decimal places is enough for most financial data, you may need to track currency exchanges to three or four decimal places.

Display Numerical Values as Currency and Percentages

  1. Select the cells you want to format.

  2. Click the Home tab.

  3. Using the tools in the Number group, follow any of these steps:

    • Click the Accounting Number Format button to apply the currency style with two decimal places. You can choose a currency symbol other than your default (which is the $ sign in the United States) by clicking the down arrow at the right edge of the Accounting Number Format button.

    • Click the Percent Style button to add a percent sign with no decimal places.

    • Click the Comma Style button to add a comma format with two decimal places.

    Display Numerical Values as Currency and Percentages

Set the Number of Decimal Places

  1. Select the cells you want to format.

  2. Click the Home tab.

  3. Follow either of these steps:

    • Click the Increase Decimal button in the Number group on the ribbon.

    • Click the Decrease Decimal button in the Number group on the ribbon.

    Set the Number of Decimal Places

    Tip

    Tip

    When you create a worksheet, you should apply the desired numerical formatting to all the cells in which you’ll store numbers of a certain type. That way, when you type the data later (or copy it from another document), it will be formatted correctly.

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