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You are here: Home / Excel / Excel Custom Number Format Guide

Excel Custom Number Format Guide

FEBRUARY 17, 2017 BY MYNDA TREACY — 45 COMMENTS

I’ve put together this Excel custom number format guide as a

resource for our members. There are loads of ways to apply
custom number formats and as a result I nd myself answering
questions that are covered in this post on a daily basis.

To be clear, number formatting in Excel is used to specify how a

value should appear in a cell or chart, but it doesn’t alter the underlying value that you
can see in the formula bar. Unless of course you format a number as text, in which
case it can no longer be treated as a number in math formulas.

Download the workbook

Download the Excel Workbook. Note: This is a .xlsx le please ensure your
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Excel Custom Number Format Guide - Table of

Contents
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Excel Custom Number Format Guide

Download the workbook
Applying Custom Number Formats
Number Format Structure
Hiding All Values
Hiding Zero Values
Custom Number Format Characters
Literal Characters
Special Characters
Digit Placeholders
Thousand Separators and Scaling
Currency Formats and Parentheses for Negative Values
Using Symbols in Formats
Colors
Date Characters
Time Formats
Fractions
Percentages
Scienti c Notation
Text/Labels
Color Code based on Values/Conditions
Repeating Leading and Trailing Characters
Padding with Zeros

Applying Custom Number Formats

To apply a custom number format rst select the cell or cells you want to format, then
CTRL+1 to open the Format Cells Dialog box, or go to the Home tab and click on the
arrow in the Number group:

This opens the Format Cells dialog box in the Number tab (below), where you can
choose ‘Custom’ from the Category list and insert your format in the ‘Type’ eld:
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Number Format Structure

Let’s start with the anatomy of a number format.

A number format is made up of 4 components, with each component separated by a

semi-colon:

Component1;Component2;Component3;Component4

Component1 formats the POSITIVE value

Component2 formats the NEGATIVE value
Component3 formats ZERO values
Component4 formats TEXT

In other words; POSITIVE ; NEGATIVE ; ZERO ; TEXT

Note: spaces around semi-colons above are added for clarity but are not required in
the format.

You may be familiar with number formats you nd in the Format Cells dialog box, like
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In the above example only the positive and negative formats are speci ed, in which
case the zero format will be the same as the positive format and text will be formatted
as it was entered.

In fact when we omit components Excel behaves as follows:

1. When just one component is provided with no semi-colons in the code, Excel
will check to see if the format is one of the default ‘Number’ formats and revert
to that format. Otherwise, if the format is unique then all numbers will be
formatted according to the format provided.
2. When the rst two components are provided Excel will use the same format for
zero, and text will appear as entered.
3. When the rst three components are provided Excel will use the formats
speci ed, and text will appear as entered.
4. If any components are skipped or left blank e.g. in this format the negative
component has been skipped, #,##0;;0 and so the negative value will not display
as demonstrated below:

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Hiding All Values

When all components are omitted and just the 3 semi-colons speci ed, Excel will not
display anything in the cell. It’s a clever way to hide data in cells and charts.

Hiding Zero Values

Another common question is ‘how do I hide zero values from displaying in my chart
labels’. The answer is simply to use the technique in point 4 above and omit the
format for the zero component. See the example below:

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Custom Number Format Characters

You may have noticed custom number formats that contain unusual characters like
this:

These characters are used as codes to tell Excel how to format the value. Let’s look at
them in turn.

Literal Characters – these appear as entered in the custom number format:

Special Characters – de ne how other characters are treated

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Digit Placeholders – used to control how numbers that contain decimal places are
displayed:

Thousand Separators and Scaling

The comma is used to display the thousand separators in a number when it is
enclosed in # signs or by zeros, and when it follows a digit placeholder it scales a
number by 1000.

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Tip 1: We can scale a value to millions by using two commas, as you can see in the
example in the last column above. And for billions we add 3 commas.

Tip 2: When appending ‘K’ for thousands we simply type it in the format, but ‘M’ for
millions must be entered with a preceding \ as the example above, or inside double
quotes. This is because ‘M’ is already reserved as a character for the date formats.
More on date formats soon.

Currency Formats and Parentheses for

Negative Values
 

Tip 1: In the example in the last column above I’ve used the underscore and right
parenthesis to align the decimal places. You can see them in red in the number
format here: $#,##0.0,K_);($#,##0.0,K)

Remember the underscore is a special character that adds a space according to the
width of the following character, in this example the right parenthesis.

Tip 2: if you don’t have a particular currency key on your keyboard, you can enter it
into the Custom Number Format dialog box using the ANSI code. To enter an ANSI
code, hold the ALT key and type in the 4 digit number. Here are some example ANSI
codes that might be useful:

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Using Symbols in Formats

Alternatively, you can use the Symbol tool (Home or Insert tab) to nd the character
you want and then insert it into a cell. From the cell you can copy it to your clipboard
and paste it into the Custom Number Format dialog box.

Tip: You can also insert symbols like up or down triangles, just make sure they’re the
Arial Geometric Shapes (subset) variety and not Wingdings:

For example, this format displays positive percentages with an upward facing triangle
and negative values with a downward facing triangle.

▼0.0%;▲0.0%

Symbols can be quite e ective when used in reports or charts like the one below:

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Colors
We can specify a color for a format, for example you might like to format negative
values in red. Color formatting is done in one of two ways:

1. We can use the color name surrounded by square brackets, like so:

$#,##0.0,K_);[red]($#,##0.0,K)

Which results in negative values like this: ($1.3K)

However, with color names we’re limited to these:

[black]

[green]

[white]

[blue]

[magenta]

[yellow]

[cyan]

[red]
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2. Alternatively we can specify a color index number e.g.:

$#,##0.0,K_);[color 3]($#,##0.0,K)

Using the color number opens up a total of 56 di erent colors, although 5 of them
are duplicates, as you can see by the hex codes in red below:

Tip: Apply color formats to chart axes or labels. Note: if you have labels then you don’t
also need the vertical axis or gridlines, unlike my example below:

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Date Characters

We can combine the month, day and year characters together in various
con gurations to get the desired format. Here are a few examples:

Click
90 here for more on how dates and time are handled in Excel.
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Time Formats

Just like the date characters, we can combine the time characters to get the format
we’re after. For example:

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And when we’re adding time that exceeds 24 hours, or 60 minutes, or 60 seconds we
can display the elapsed time like so:

Fractions
Let’s go back to school and recap some of the di erent types of fractions:

Proper – where the absolute value of the fraction is less than 1 e.g. 1/2
Improper – where the absolute value of the fraction is greater than or equal to 1
e.g. 4/3
Mixed Fractions – are another way to write improper fractions where the whole
is written separate to the fraction, for example 4/3 would be written 1 1/3

Use the ? symbol to specify the varying number of digits to display.

It’s important to remember that the underlying value in the cell, as displayed in the
‘Value’ column above, is what is used in your formulas that reference those cells. The
Formatted result is simply how it appears, but you must be careful if you are using
those formatted results in calculations that don’t reference the cell directly. For
example if you were to enter those formatted values into a calculator you’d get a
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Percentages
Use the % sign to display numbers as a percentage of 100. Remember, a zero in the
custom number format displays both signi cant and insigni cant digits, and the # will
only display signi cant digits as per the examples below:

Scienti c Notation
Scienti c Notation allows us to express very large numbers in a decimal form of
shorthand. It’s commonly used by scientists and mathematicians. Let’s use
7,830,000,000 as our example value. I think you’ll agree it’s a pretty big number.

In scienti c notation we can express it as 7.83 x 109

We raise 10 to the power of 9 because 9 decimal places have been removed from the
original number to be left with 7.83. And when we multiply 7.83 by 109 we get our
original value of 7,830,000,000. Ok, math lesson over.

In Excel (and some calculators) we can’t use ‘x’ in a number, nor can we insert
superscript. Instead we use the upper (or lower case) E+ notation like so:

7.83E+09 or 7.83e+09

To apply this formatting the custom number format is 0.00E+00 or 0.##E+00.

Remember we can use 0 to display both signi cant and insigni cant digits, or if we
only want to display signi cant digits we use #.

Here are some examples:

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Did you notice the precision in the ‘Formatted Result’ of the 3rd example above? See
how it appears to round the value to one decimal place and therefore omits the ‘3’ in
7.83. Be wary of this if you’re likely to refer to the face value of these cells, as opposed
to the actual underlying value.

Remember to use the 0 digit place holder to show both signi cant and insigni cant
digits, and use the # to only display signi cant digits.

Engineering Notation
Engineering notation is a version of scienti c notation in which the exponent of ten
must be divisible by three. The format contains 3 # before the decimal place and 3
zeros after the decimal place to force the result to return an exponent that is divisible
by 3.

Text/Labels
We can append or pre x our values with text while still maintaining the underlying
number for use in formulas. This can be handy when formatting values like kilometres
or days/hours/minutes, Over/Under etc.

To display both text and numbers in a cell simply insert your text in double quotes, or
if it’s only a single character then precede it with a backslash (\).

*Don’t
90 forget, Literal Characters are displayed without the need for quotation marks.
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Here are some examples you might nd useful:

The last example uses the @ symbol for Text. In other words, the cell is formatted as
text, which is also why it is left aligned, but the custom cell format displays the # tag at
the front of the text without the need to actually type it in the cell.

Color Code based on Values/Conditions

Remember that by default the custom number format is broken into the following
components:

Positive ; Negative ; Zero ; Text

However, we can override the default components with up to two conditions and add
color coding based on criteria we set.

For example, let’s say we have a threshold of 500 units per day. Anything below this
should be red and anything 500 or above should be formatted green. We can use the
format:

[red] [<500] #,##0;[color 10] [>=500] #,##0

Which yields the following results:

Tip: once a condition is met Excel doesn’t test the other conditions so it’s important
you get the order of tests correct so it doesn’t stop at the rst criteria. Just like a
nested IF formula.

90course we could also write this format like so:

Of
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[color 10] [>=500] #,##0; [red] [<500] #,##0

What if we want 3 conditions? Well, we can’t insert 3 conditions as such, but we can
insert 2 and then apply a font color to the cells, which will be picked up for all
remaining values. This works because custom cell formats override the font color.

In the example below values less than 500 are red, values less than 1000 are
orange/amber and values 1000 and over, for which there is no criteria, pick up the cell
font color, which is green:

Repeating Leading and Trailing Characters

We can ll a cell containing text values with a speci c character using the asterisk
symbol. For example:

Padding with Zeros

Remember that zero is a digit placeholder which displays both signi cant and
insigni cant digits, so we can exploit this to force Excel to display an insigni cant zero
at the front of a value, or to apply spacing between digits.

It’s handy for phone number formats, bar codes, product codes etc. Here are a few
examples:

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Notes on Custom Number Formats

1. Custom Number formats are saved in the workbook in which they’re created and
are not available in any other workbooks.
2. Custom Number formats do not change the underlying value. This is important if
you want to reference those cells in formulas.
3. Formats can appear to round values which will not be re ected in the results of
formulas that reference those cells
4. Regional Settings – this post assumes your region uses the full stop/period
character for a decimal place and a comma for the thousand separators. If your
region di ers, please amend accordingly.

Sources
I’d like to recognise the following resources which I learnt from in the writing of this
guide:

Microsoft Custom Number Formatting

Jon von der Heyden’s Comprehensive Guide to Number Formats in Excel
David McRitchie’s Color Index
Wikipedia – Engineering Notation

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If you have a question and need to provide a workbook/data, please open a topic on
the forum and attach the les.

Seeing the data will make it easier for us to understand your problem and give you
an answer.

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Comments

Steve says
January 21, 2019 at 5:41 am

Hi Mynda,
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This is a GREAT article! Thank you for sharing your expertise!
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Question for you… Is there a way to save custom number formats in [Link] so
they’re available in all of the new workbooks that I create? I don’t want to save
[Link] with “pre-formatted cells,” but I’d like the custom number formats to be
available in the custom number list, if or when I need them.

For example: I created ve di erent custom number formats in ve cells in a

worksheet. Those new formats are now available in my Number > Custom List. I
deleted the contents of those ve cells and reset their format to General (or, Clear
All). The ve custom number formats are still available in my Custom List. I saved the
workbook as [Link] in my XLSTART folder. But, when I open [Link], or start a
new workbook, the custom number formats no longer appear in my Custom List.

Do I need to create new “Cell Styles” for the custom number formats to be
permanent? I’d experiment with this, but my computer is out for repair. Thanks.

Reply

Catalin Bombea says

January 21, 2019 at 4:31 pm

Hi Steve,
There is no easy way to store custom formats to be available in any new
books. You can use a code in your [Link] that applies those formats to
some cells of the active workbook. The code can be attached to a button in
[Link] ribbon, to apply the format to selected cells. It’s even faster than
going through the normal menu.

Reply

Guru says
December 29, 2018 at 9:31 pm

Is there a way to format the number as below:

1) =1000 and =1000000 and =1000000000 format as billions i.e. B
and
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if the resultant number is less than 100 show the decimal value otherwise no need
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of decimal.
Eg:
33.5 should be 33.5 itself
345.6 should be 346
5655000 should be 5.7M
56550000 should be 56.6M
565500000 should be 566M

Thanks in advance

Reply

Mynda Treacy says

December 31, 2018 at 7:29 am

Hi Guru,

You can’t do this with custom number formats. You’d have to use a formula
like IF(A1<1000000,A1,IF(A1>1000000,ROUND(A1/1000000,1),IF(… etc. to
round the values depending on their size.

More on the IF Function here.

Mynda

Reply

Ron MVP says

August 26, 2018 at 11:01 am

You missed one time code, decimal values for thousandths of a second ie
sss.000

This format code is needed for precise duration and interval calculation. I found that
this custom format works best for me

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d “days” hh:mm:ss.000
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Good reference for custom data formats. A few more examples would be nice.

(even for events that you count in just seconds.)

You have to enter your times as 00:00:00.000

Unfortunately Excel converts the time display in the formula bar to a date/time
stamp starting at 1900-01-00 00:00:00 AM The decimal seconds are there, just not
displayed in the formula bar.

The problem I have is I want to record elapsed time

Reply

Mynda Treacy says

August 26, 2018 at 8:21 pm

Thanks for sharing, Ron.

Reply

Sandeep Kothari says

June 2, 2018 at 8:04 pm

Very useful.

Reply

Mynda Treacy says

June 3, 2018 at 8:31 am

Glad you found it useful, Sandeep

Reply

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Samuel Barros says

November 29, 2017 at 10:38 pm

Muito bom o artigo, simples e objetivo, resulta muito no aprendizado.

Reply

Mynda Treacy says

November 30, 2017 at 10:14 am

Thanks, Samuel. Glad you found it useful

Reply

o r says
October 10, 2017 at 6:54 am

You mentioned “Thousand Separators and Scaling” for big numbers (kilo and mega).
what about little numbers (milli, micro ,piko)?

Reply

Mynda Treacy says

October 10, 2017 at 10:46 am

Hi O r,

Great question! There’s no custom number format for these. You’d have to
normalize the numbers, as described here:
[Link]

Mynda

Reply
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Shmuel says
February 23, 2017 at 6:54 pm

Hi Mynda

I have subscribed to a number of your courses and continue to be impressed by

your aws delivery. I also teach Excel in Lagos, Nigeria and nd myself resorting to
“err”s and “emm”s whilst trying to nd the best way to put a point across.

FLIGHT DURATION ACROSS TIME ZONES

I recently found myself in a situation where I needed to prepare a spreadsheet of

my journey which involved crossing time zones.

The usual “arrival time – departure time” gives erroneous results unless modi ed in
the following way:-

At the heart of the solution is the fact that Excel views time in fractions of 24hrs so
you would need to convert the di erence in hours between the two time zones into
a fraction of 24 then add or subtract this from the departure time in the formula
above e.g.

Depart LON (GMT) 07:00 arrive LOS (GMT+1) 14:00

Flight duration = Arrival time – (Departure time + 1/24) = 6 hrs

Warm Regards
Shmuel

Reply

Mynda Treacy says

February 23, 2017 at 9:04 pm

Thanks for your kind words, Shmuel!

Good of you to share your tip, too.

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Cheers,

Mynda

Reply

Jon Wittwer says

February 22, 2017 at 7:13 am

This is a great article, Mynda! It got me wondering about what would happen if you
changed the color palette (because almost all my old templates use a custom color
palette). It turns out that the color codes for Color1-56 CAN be changed. For
example, [Color10] doesn’t always have to be green. You can go to File > Options >
Save > Colors and modify the color palette.

As another side note, the Color1-56 codes in Google Sheets are xed colors (but
match the default Excel color palette), so it doesn’t look like customizing a color will
translate into Google Sheets if you upload/convert your customized Excel le.

Reply

Mynda Treacy says

February 22, 2017 at 10:11 am

Cheers, Jon. Great tip about the custom color palette. I didn’t know about
that.

Mynda

Reply

Hussein says
February 21, 2017 at 3:04 pm
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It is really amazing e orts. Do you mind if I translate your post to Arabic along with
the example le with keeping all the credit to you and your website?
[Link] (website eld is not working in comment area).

Reply

Mynda Treacy says

February 22, 2017 at 10:12 am

Thanks, Hussein.

Yes, you’re welcome to translate my post with a link back to my site for
credit.

Cheers,

Mynda

Reply

Hussein says
February 22, 2017 at 2:49 pm

Thanks Mynda for your permission.

Reply

Amadou says
February 21, 2017 at 1:16 am

Very usefull tips especially when combined with Excel cells styles. I’ve just read the
article and it’s already saving me a lot of time. Thanks you so much for this !!

Reply
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Mynda Treacy says

February 21, 2017 at 8:40 am

Thanks, Amadou

Reply

Simon says
February 20, 2017 at 12:34 am

Hi Mynda

one of my favourite formats is when I want to show all numbers with the units in
line, negatives in red (for screen viewing) and in brackets (for printing).

For this, I use #,##0.00 ;[Red](* #,##0.00) and, because I frequently use it, I’very
made it into a macro and saved it in my personal sheet so that it available in any
worksheet I use.

There was some fantastic examples in yours that I never even realised that I wanted
to use before seeing them

Thanks for noting all of this down.

Reply

Mynda Treacy says

February 20, 2017 at 7:21 am

Thanks for sharing your tip, Simon. It’s always nice to hear what other people
nd useful and I’m sure there are more who will like this format too.

Mynda

Reply

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Mehdi HAMMADI says

February 20, 2017 at 12:09 am

Hi Mynda,
I released several year ago a similar workbook with a presentation to explain and
illustrate the custom formating however I never imagine to use symbols to illustrate
the grow of a metric like you done for charts. This tip is very interesting and this is
what i love from MVP simple tips that make a big di erence. Thanks a lot Mynda for
sharing this.
Best regards
Mehdi

Reply

Mynda Treacy says

February 20, 2017 at 7:17 am

Thanks, Mehdi! Glad you found a new tip amongst it all

Reply

Mitchell Allen says

February 18, 2017 at 10:10 pm

Well, you moved the bar for “pillar” posts. Let’s just call this a “foundational” post! I
learned quite a few new tricks, some of which are eye-popping. This will be my go-to
guide for formatting numbers!

Cheers,

Mitch

Reply

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Mynda Treacy says

February 18, 2017 at 10:10 pm

Thanks, Mitchell Glad you’ll be able to make use of it.

Reply

Bill Brooks says

February 18, 2017 at 4:47 am

This guide is a great tool, the kind I like to save for future use. Is there a better way
to save it for o ine use than a .PDF? The challenge with printing it to .PDF is the
banner ads are still there and they block the guide.

Reply

Mynda Treacy says

February 19, 2017 at 3:50 pm

Hi Bill,

Thanks for your email. We’ve added a ‘print’ icon to the left side of the page
above. Unfortunately it bunches up some of the images a bit but it’s the best
we can get it.

Kind regards,

Mynda

Reply

Bill Brooks says

February 21, 2017 at 7:19 am

90 Mynda, that works just ne. Thanks for the help.

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Reply

Manish Singhee says

February 16, 2018 at 3:43 pm

Hi Bill,

In Mozilla, you can view the page in “Reader View” (this option is towards the
extreme right of the URL bar. In Reader View you get to see only the article
minus all the ads and sidebar items. You can then either print a .pdf le
using any of the free pdf conversion utilities like CutePDF, PDF-Viewer, etc.,
and save the pdf le to your system for o ine use.

Reply

jim says
February 18, 2017 at 3:00 am

Well done for keeping this to such a short article; it really is a HUGE topic!
a few additional points to confabulate your readers further (and there’s more!)

Using a number formatted as text as a number – can be done if you add a double
minus before it to force excel to evaluate it
Full year can also be formatted by using “e” instead of “yyyy”
Line feeds can be added to a format using ANSI code 10 (ALT+0010) – but dates will
still show as ###### if the column isn’t wide enough (use the TEXT function if this
really bugs you)
If you use a condition then the next rule is still used for negative numbers and the
next for others (eg [<-1] -0;0.0;-0.0 will apply the -0.0 format to all zeroes and
positives)
Colouring text using conditional formatting trumps number formatting (the two
condition limit in normal formatting can be annoying)
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Reply

Mynda Treacy says

February 18, 2017 at 7:42 am

Great tips, Jim. Thanks for sharing them.

On your condition example, just to clarify for others; it works that way
because you only have one condition, my examples have two conditions.

Reply

Fabio says
February 18, 2017 at 2:02 am

thank you! Very clear and comprehensive guide

Reply

Mynda Treacy says

February 18, 2017 at 7:39 am

Thanks, Fabio!

Reply

Jonathan Cooper says

February 17, 2017 at 11:34 pm

Good article. Better than any I have seen done before. One point to be clear on, you
are absolutely correct that the format does not a ect the underlying value.
However, I don’t think you can say “…it doesn’t alter the underlying value that you
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can see in the formula bar”. If you input a number like 43000 and format it as a date
then it does a ect what you see in the formula bar. Even if you format it as a
percentage it changes what you see in the formula bar slightly.

Reply

Mynda Treacy says

February 18, 2017 at 7:42 am

Ooh, good point, Jonathan. Thanks!

Reply

Cindy says
February 17, 2017 at 11:25 pm

Excellent workbook and a great resource! I know I will refer to it often. Thank you!

Reply

Mynda Treacy says

February 18, 2017 at 7:39 am

Thanks, Cindy. I’m glad you’ll nd it useful.

Reply

Serge says
February 17, 2017 at 11:21 pm

Thanks Mynda for a most useful guide.

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Mynda Treacy says

February 18, 2017 at 7:43 am

Cheers, Serge

Reply

Bob Van Winter says

February 17, 2017 at 11:19 pm

Thank you Mynda for the insight into custom number formatting. I have a question.
Is there a way to build your own custom number formatting? I need to have a eld in
my spreadsheets that is a letdown ratio ie: 25 to 1. I currently need to format the
column as text and type 25:1. I’d like to be able to have the column as a custom
number format rather than as text.

Reply

Mynda Treacy says

February 19, 2017 at 2:39 pm

Hi Bob,

You could try this:

#":1"

This will format any number as :1 e.g. 25:1 or 30:1 etc.

Kind regards,

Mynda

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Abraham Heunes says

February 17, 2017 at 10:38 pm

Thank Mynda for an excellent guide on HOW TO with Custom Number Formatting.
Now I don’t have to wreck my brain to gure out How.

Reply

Mynda Treacy says

February 17, 2017 at 10:50 pm

Thanks, Abraham! Glad it was worth writing

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