Percentage Increase/Decrease

Ian,

Try...
=(D5-D4)/D4
Then format column E with a percent number format,
such as... 0.0%

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--
Jim Cone
San Francisco, USA


"ianonline"
<[email protected]>
wrote in message
Hello! I often appear better than most people at Excel but coming here
shows I'm not! I've been searching through pages and pages for a
formula to calucate percentages but can't find anything quite right.

Column D is an account balance with a new row for each day.
Column E is the percentage difference.

Is it possible to calculate this?
I tried *=1-(D5/D4)* which gave me the correct figure, except positive
when the difference was a reduction so should have been -XX%, not XX%.
However this figure thn gave the wrong figures when it was an
increase.
Any help you can give is hugely appreciated. I often need help lately
with odds bits and would be interested in any fee-based support
available.
Thank you for your help.
Ian

ianonline wrote:
> Column D is an account balance with a new row for each day.
> Column E is the percentage difference.
> [....]
>
> I tried *=1-(D5/D4)* which gave me the correct figure, except positive
> when the difference was a reduction so should have been -XX%, not XX%.
> However this figure thn gave the wrong figures when it was an increase.

If you want to say "D5 is x% more (or less) than D4", the correct
formula is:

=d5/d4 - 1

Beware when D4 is zero. Mathematically, you cannot express a
percentage difference in that case. But people still like to see some
percentage difference. One approach (which not everyone likes) is:

=if(d4 = 0, 100%, d5/d4 - 1)

The choice of 100% is arbitrary. Other common choices are "" (blank
cell) or D5 (usually w-a-y too large, IMHO).