Microsoft® Office Excel® 2007 Plain & Simple

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 ...