• Skip to main content

Master Your Tech

Mobile phones, software, consumer electronic how-to guides

  • iPhone
  • Excel
  • Powerpoint
  • Word
  • Google Drive
You are here: Home / Excel / How to Make Negative Numbers Red in Excel for Office 365

How to Make Negative Numbers Red in Excel for Office 365

posted on March 19, 2019

When you have a spreadsheet with a lot of numbers in it, those numbers can easily get jumbled together. Whether it’s a mixture of regular numbers, currency, or percentages, it can be difficult to determine what data is important.

This is particularly concerning when some of your numbers are negative. Fortunately Excel has a way for you to adjust the formatting in your spreadsheet so that negative numbers are automatically made red. Our guide below will show you how to apply this formatting setting to a selection of cells in your sheet.

How to Automatically Make Negative Numbers Red in Excel

The steps in this article were performed in Excel for Office 365, but will also work in other versions of the program. Note that we will be selecting a column of cells in the steps below, but you can elect to choose a row, a single cell, or even the entire spreadsheet instead.

Step 1: Open your spreadsheet in Excel.

Step 2: Select the cells in which you would like to display negative numbers as red.

how to select the cells to format

Step 3: Right-click on one of the selected cells, then choose the Format Cells option.

open the format cells windows

Step 4: Choose the Number option from the column at the left side of the window.

select the number formatting option

Step 5: Select one of the red number options under Negative numbers, then click the OK button.

how to automatically make numbers red in excel

Note that you may also need to adjust the number of decimal places, as the default setting for this formatting option is going to give your numbers two decimal places.

Do you dislike how any of the Web page addresses or file locations that you put into your cells are automatically turned into links? Find out how to disable this automatic hyperlinking so that that entered data remains as plain text.

Matthew Burleigh
Matthew Burleigh

Matthew Burleigh has been a freelance writer since the early 2000s. You can find his writing all over the Web, where his content has collectively been read millions of times.

Matthew received his Master’s degree in Computer Science, then spent over a decade as an IT consultant for small businesses before focusing on writing and website creation.

The topics he covers for MasterYourTech.com include iPhones, Microsoft Office, and Google Apps.

You can read his full bio here.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)

Filed Under: Excel

Search

  • Contact Us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms and Conditions

Copyright © 2023 MasterYourTech.com