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!!
