Formatting Cells in Microsoft Excel

Video Transcript

"Hi, I’m Gary with Expert Village; let’s take a closer look on how format our cells. We are going to put in, I put in a numeric digit in one of the cells and I’m going to go up here to format and choose cells and I am going to show you the many different options we have for changing the look or the value for that cell that we just put in, that number. So right now it is set as a general, general number and that basically means that it could be text, it could be a numeric digit, there is no set format, formatting to it. But let’s say we want to go and have that number expressed as a, as currency, so we would choose currency and it would give us different options so we are going to go ahead and keep it the dollar symbol and we also have ways to express how many, how many digits we should, we should show or if we should show commas or if we should show it in brackets as say, let’s say this column is going to be expressing losses in a financial sheet so we would want it maybe expressed in red and in brackets so basically we can format this number. Let’s say that we pick it as a general dollar, dollar amount and we hit okay and we see that now our, our amount is expressed in dollars and we also have the two, two digits at the end for the decimal, for the cents. So let’s go ahead and show another look on how to format this cell. We will go click on format and then click on cell and let's say that we want this to be expressed as a percentage so we will go ahead and click on percentage and we see that there is how many, it shows how many decimal places we would like to be expressed in the percentage and let's say that we want two and we hit “ok” and now we have the, that same number expressed in a percent with two decimals places, decimal points out and with the percent sign. So all of these are different ways that we can express how to change the look of our cells by what kind of value we want. Now if we want it to be custom, we see under custom we have different types of values and we have under “special” different types of values. Let’s say before we showed a zip code so that’s going to change into a five digit number because all zip codes are five digit numbers and then we are going to have the seven, the 789 that we started with, it’s going to add in two zeros in front of it because now it’s reading this number as a zip code. So these are all different ways of formatting our cells and it’s very important that we, if we’re dealing with numbers we should have the cells formatted as numbers and if we are dealing with text and numerical digits and text we should also have it formatted as text so we always come up with proper look for our entries. "