Number Format question

  • Thread starter Thread starter darby
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darby

I have a simple formula in one cell, dividing A1 into B1 and I cannot find
the correct formatting to have it read correct e.g. 71.5 The closest I get
is either 71.5% or .715. I can obviously multiply the cells by a 100 but it
seems Excel should have the above fomatting option - am I wrong?

Thanks
 
Did you try formatting it Number with Decimal Places = 1?

It sounds like the result of your calculation is .715, and you can't really
get excel to display that as 71.5
 
You are dealing with a returned number < 1 when you divide say 143 by 200.

The returned value is .715

Multiplying by 100 is only method AFAIK

No Custom Format that I know about.

But I am eager to learn<g>


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP
 
Steve Yandl said:
Asking Excel to display the result of a division that results in
0.715 as 71.5 without either the % symbol or "/100" is asking
the application to display the result incorrectly.
Click to expand...

So by your reasoning, you believe formats like "0," and "0,," are wrong
because they cause Excel to display values like 1,234,567 incorrectly?

Rhetorical question. Your rationale is simply flawed, IMHO. If Excel can
scale the appearance of values by dividing by 1000 or 1,000,000, I cannot
think of any philosophical reason why it could not scale the appearance of
values by multipying by 100, for example. The fact is: that kind of
scaling is at least as useful as the other scaling, based on the relative
frequency of postings for each.

(Personally, I do not like displaying percentages without "%". But I have
seen it all too often in financial reports, namely in a column labeled
"percentage of...".)

I suspect the greatest impediment, besides MS's inertia when it comes to
useful improvements, is thinking of a meaningful, unambiguous and
backward-compatible syntax for a custom format that would scale by
multiplication. For example, %00.0 already behaves a certain way.


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