Formatting Numbers in Excel

When should you format numbers?

You can make very big numbers much easier to comprehend by adding them the comma (,) thousand’s separator.

See for example the following number: 47000000. How much is it? Did you have to count the zeros? Now, it is much easier to comprehend when written as 47,000,000.

When dealing with very small numbers, increase the number of decimal places to see your data in higher precision.

And when dealing with currency, you will usually want to include two decimal points to represent the cents. Unless of course, you are dealing with big number - then you will better hide the cents.