Cell Formatting Options

Excel is smart (well, sometimes). It automatically applies formats as you type anything in a cell. You type 1/2 in a cell; Excel turns it as 1-Feb (date format). You enter 1 1/2 (notice the space in between); Excel shows it as fraction format. Any input that Excel doesn’t recognise as a number will be taken as text. We fairly know about various formats available in Excel. Let’s see a quick overview of them.

There are more than 10 types of built-in formats available in Excel. But digest this; Excel categorizes any value you enter in a cell in just 2 type’s viz. a number and a non-number. A number can be further formatted to “display” the way we want on the face of Excel but the underlying number will not change. To understand what I mean, see the below picture.

I entered 10 in all the cells and formatted them using different formats as mentioned in third column. Same number is shown in different formats. We can notice the formula bar selecting each cell, no matter what is shown in the cell, formula bar always contains 10 (except for date, time & percentage).

So it is clear that any format you apply over a cell, ONLY appearance of that cell value will be changed accordingly but not the actual value.

General

General format is default format of Excel. For the most part, numbers that are formatted with the General format are displayed just the way that you type them. However, if the cell is not wide enough to show the entire number, the General format rounds off numbers that have decimals. The General number format also uses scientific (exponential) notation for large numbers (12 or more digits)

Select the cell(s) > Press Ctrl+1 > Number tab > under Category, select General to apply this format.

Number

Number format will place 2 decimal points by default to the value you enter. You will have options to increase / decrease the decimal points, to place a thousand separator and to select a way how negative numbers appear.

Select the cell(s) > Press Ctrl+1 > Number tab > under Category, select Number to apply this format.

Explore other formats and options based on your convenience. We will see more about few formats that are worth discussing in one of our future posts. See you!!