5. Formatting the content of the cells

In MS Excel, cells may be filled in with numbers and text, which may be formatted in many ways. To understand the multiple possibilities offered by Excel in terms of formatting, click on the cell of interest and press CTRL+1, or right-click on the cell of interest and choose Format Cells.... The following menu appears (see picture to the right). Here you may choose to format your numerical input as a number, currency, date, time, percentage… or not to format it at all (General). There are many formats in each category, for example currency with the monetary symbol placed to the left or to the right, negative value appearing in red, dates including day or year, time in the 12H or 24H format… and there is even a way to get exactly the format that you want with Custom. You may also use the Number section of the Home ribbon. You’ll find several basic options to quickly format numbers in a couple of clicks.