Microsoft Excel has many different ways to compare data.
Many of these options exist as formulas, and it's likely that you've used a formula in the past to add values in a column or subtract one cell from another.
But there are many other useful ways to look up values, including a way to calculate percentages.
Our article below will show you how to calculate percentage in Excel and then display it by setting the formatting option.
How to use the percentage formula in Excel 2013
- Open the Excel file.
- Click the cell where you want to enter the formula.
- Type =XX/YY into a cell, but use cell layout instead.
- Copy and paste the formula into other cells as needed.
- Right-click cells with formulas and select Format Cells.
- Select Interest, then click OK.
Our article continues below with more information on how to calculate percentage in Excel, including images of these steps.
Excel is a great tool to perform mathematical operations on the data you have entered into your cells. These operations are usually done with a formula such as this subtraction formula.
One of the operations you can perform on data is to calculate the percentage of one cell's value compared to another. This is achieved by dividing one number by another number to get a percentage.
Learning how to use the percentage formula in Excel not only allows you to provide additional information about your data to people viewing the spreadsheet, but it can also compare your data in ways that make it more digestible. These formatting changes, combined with some usability features like this one that pins rows to the top of the page, can make Excel much easier to read.
Our tutorial below will show you how to use this formula, as well as how to change the format of cells that contain percentages so that they appear with a % symbol behind them.
Sometimes you might have a bunch of cells with a letter or number at the beginning of a cell that you don't want. Our article on how to remove the first character from a cell in Excel can show you how to change this.
How to Create a Percentage Formula in Excel 2013 (Picture Guide)
The steps in this article were performed in Microsoft Excel 2013, but they will work in other versions of Excel as well.
Note that we are performing this task with a formula, so the percentage displayed in the selected cell will change if you change the cells used to calculate that percentage.
These steps will show you how to calculate a percentage in Microsoft Excel and then format that data to display it as a percentage.
You should now see the displayed percentages in the cells.
Now that you know how to calculate percentages in Excel spreadsheets, you can use these steps in other places where they can help.
As with any Excel formulas that use cell layout, a percentage formula refers to a cell, not to the data it contains. If you change the value in one of the cells used in the formula, the percentage value will also be updated.
Although this guide is primarily about how to use the percentage formula in Excel, when you need to determine the percentage from cell data, you can also determine the percentage from two numbers, or from one number and the location of the cell. So the formula =4/10 or =4/A1 will also work.
Would you like to be able to view the formulas you use in your cells? Learn how to display formulas in Excel so you can see the contents of the formula, not its results.
Frequently Asked Questions About Percentage Calculation in Excel
Where is the percentage format in Excel?
If you have a percentage value in one of the spreadsheet cells that is the result of using an Excel formula to calculate percentages, you can use percentage formatting on it.
You can apply percentage format settings to selected cells in an Excel spreadsheet by right-clicking them and selecting the Format Cells option.
This menu allows you to customize the format values for the data in your cells, and one of the options you can choose is for displaying percentage values with a percent sign.
Simply select the Percentage option under Category in the left column of the Format Cells dialog box.
How can I determine percentage change in Excel?
While there is no specific formula to find the percentage increase or percentage decrease for some values in an Excel worksheet, you can calculate the percentage change.
This can be done by first determining the difference between the values in two cells and then dividing that difference by the cell's original value.
First, you will need to enter two values into the spreadsheet cells. For example, we can put the original value in cell b2 and the new value in cell c2.
You can then enter an equal sign to indicate that this will be a formula and enter something like =(b2-c2)/b2.
In essence, this is the calculation of a specific amount of the difference between two cells, and then dividing this difference from the original value.
This simple example can help you, for example, determine the percentage change between the original price and the sale price.
The formula shown is also a good example of how you can divide or multiply values in combination with other mathematical operations to perform some more advanced calculations.
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