Need help with percentages.

**jwalth02** · 09-22-2008, 12:57 AM

Hi everyone, I wasn't quite sure which forum to post this in so I figured General would be ok.

I use a series of spreadsheets at work and deal with percentages all night long. I recently changed the format of the cells to percentage and deal with having to enter it 0.3 but it's still faster then the old way we did it. But some problems have come up because of it.

In some of the cells we rarely have to put a decimal in it so I had those set up to have 0 decimal spaces, but the few times recently have bitten my a** pretty hard because it rounded 17.5 to 18%.

Long story short is there any way to set the cells to display the decimal when we type it in and not when we don't?

**jwalth02** · 09-22-2008, 04:34 AM

To go a little more in depth I need at least two decimal places so I can do for example 0.32% but in that same cell we sometimes do 2% but it shows as 2.00% since I have it set to 2 decimal points. I need to know if there's a format to have it not show the zeroes if I only put the 2%.

**oldchippy** · 09-22-2008, 06:35 AM

Hi,

May be you could use this? Format the cell to General\%

**jwalth02** · 09-22-2008, 06:56 AM

Awesome! Thank you so much it works great now.

Though I did notice on one of the cells it still rounded it up but then I adjusted the size of the cell and it stopped rounding.

Thanks again!

**jwalth02** · 09-27-2008, 11:41 PM

OK having a problem again. I had the percentage working how I wanted, but I was gone for a day and they changed our sheets again, but they didn't change any of the formulas. Now for some reason when I set the cells to General\% again it makes for example 197.4 = 19740 which is way off.

Any Ideas?

**ratcat** · 09-28-2008, 01:37 AM

G'day

When to change the format from General to Percentage, excel automatically multiples the cell by 100.

So you going to have to adjust you formula to condensate the percentage format adjustment. Add /100 to the formula

HTH

**jwalth02** · 09-28-2008, 02:28 AM

That's not the problem. I have the formula just fine, I just want Excel to show the decimals when they're there and not to when they're not.

**oldchippy** · 09-28-2008, 04:30 AM

Originally Posted by jwalth02

OK having a problem again. I had the percentage working how I wanted, but I was gone for a day and they changed our sheets again, but they didn't change any of the formulas. Now for some reason when I set the cells to General\% again it makes for example 197.4 = 19740 which is way off.

Any Ideas?

Hi,

When you say "changed our sheets again" can you tell me what the format is before YOU try to change it?

**jwalth02** · 09-28-2008, 04:58 AM

Ok. The sheet figures up weights, there's a blend weight and a chemical weight, the formula that figures the chemical weight based on the blend weight multiplied by the percent of chemical per sack amount. The formula used is =D10*C8*K2 where D10 is the sack amount C8 is the percentage and K2 is the blend weight.

At first C8 was just set to general because we couldn't figure out why it would make it 10% when we typed .1%. Then when I figured that out I set it to percentage with 2 decimal points to allow for the percentages we use, like 0.32 is a common one. My supervisor added another sheet to the book at the end and didn't change anything to it.

But now I've noticed when I changed the cell formats from percentage with 2 decimals to General\% when I type a percentage it takes 197.4 and makes it 19740. I just want it to turn the number typed into a percentage like the percent with 2 decimals does but I don't want the zeroes there when I don't need them like the General\% does but it figures it wrong.

Edit: Well I've slightly patched it by setting the cell C8 to General\% and made the formula =(D10*C8*K2)/100 and it works but I don't know how much my boss will like that if he sees it. Is there an easier way to do this?