From the course: Excel 2016 Essential Training

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.

Exploring numeric and special formatting

Exploring numeric and special formatting

From the course: Excel 2016 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Exploring numeric and special formatting

- Excel has quite a few different ways to format numbers. We're looking at a worksheet called Numeric in the workbook called 04 Formatting. Quite a few different number types here. First of all, in column B we se social security numbers. By the way, these are randomly generated, I hope we didn't put yours in there. What's wrong with these? Not exactly wrong, but what's a little bit unusual? As we use social security numbers, typically we see dashes in there after the first three characters, and then two more characters and then another dash, and then the final four. Rather than typing dashes, the person who put in the data perhaps thought, I'll get to those later. Now ideally what you do in a situation like this is format the cells ahead of time, in fact, the entire column, in this case. If you right click a column letter you can immediately go to Format Cells, and you wouldn't necessarily know where to find this but on the Number tab there is a category called Special, and there we…

Contents