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.
Step 3: Right-click on one of the selected cells, then choose the Format Cells option.
Step 4: Choose the Number option from the column at the left side of the window.
Step 5: Select one of the red number options under Negative numbers, then click the OK button.
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.
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