Instead of showing big digits in a cell, you can format numbers in thousands, millions, and billions in Excel.

If the Excel cell format is not changing to a number because the Number formatting is not working, take these steps to fix the issue.

Excel gives you quite a few options to choose from under Number > Date in the Format Cells dialog (which, again, you get to by pressing Ctrl-1 or Command-1 on the Mac).

Padding Numbers In the previous example you saw that we can format numbers and force then to display a fixed number of decimal places. The 0.00 part of the custom format makes this happen. For example ...

When you type a seven-or-ten-digit phone number into an Excel cell that uses the phone number format, Excel will automatically change the way the number looks so that it appears as a phone number ...

Combine an Excel custom format with data validation and remove the pressure for input perfection from personnel by letting Excel do the work.

How to Format Fractions to Percentages in Excel. The cells in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet can hold various types of numerical data, including fractions and percentages.