Excel offers a wide range of formats. It also lets you create your own formats.
The exercise is in the Custom Formats file. The results is in the Custom Formats Result file.
Here is a number shown in traditional currency format.
Suppose we would rather show it in cents. There is no preset format. However, we can build our own. First we list them, then we will demonstrate.
Here are the steps:
Format menu
Cells
select Number tab in the Format Cells dialog box
optional- select the number format for the number section of your custom format so it appears in the Type box later
select Custom category
modify the custom format as needed in the Type box
click OK
Here we selected the general number format in the fourth step.
Then we click the Custom category. Notice that it puts General in the Type box.
Then we add additional formatting in the Type box. Here we add text and enclose it in quotes for "cents". We also leave a space so there is a space between the number and cents.
Notice the Sample section above the Type box. It shows what the new format would look like.
We like what we see, so we click OK to finish. Here is our result.
We can do the same to create a version that ends in "c", such as 50c.
Now suppose we wanted to get creative and show a different format for negative numbers and make them Red. We will cover that in the next lesson
One thing to note on custom formats. They are local to the workbook. All is not lost. What you in that situation:
Open up the workbook where you had the custom format
Paste that format to the new workbook
Next we will cover more on custom formats- using colors, negative and zero numbers and other options.