www.excelrange.com » cell format http://www.excelrange.com Sharing Excel skills Tue, 11 Jan 2011 10:09:35 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9 en hourly 1 Pivot Table Tip: Color All One Type of Data Items at Once http://www.excelrange.com/pivot-table-tip-color-all-one-type-of-data-items/ http://www.excelrange.com/pivot-table-tip-color-all-one-type-of-data-items/#comments Mon, 21 Dec 2009 08:12:05 +0000 Märt Parker http://www.excelrange.com/?p=266 Microsoft Excel’s styling capabilities have improved over the time. But there are still lackings on some areas. One thing I personally miss is the ability to attach styles to Pivot table items. For example you have in one table the sums of revenues and sums of quantities – and you wish the revenues to be formatted differently. Of course, you can manually change the formatting of each revenue cell, but this is not a very modern way to handle it – considering we use styles for such formatting tasks in MS Office and other programs nowadays.

I have a little tip for those of you who face the same problem – you can still attach different color to different Pivot table items. It is possible to use custom formatting to define the color of the Pivot table data item. This way all data of the same kind will be formatted with the same font color – resistant to table refreshes, size changes and field arrangements. And most importantly – you can change the color instantly from one place.

Field format is applied by right-clicking on the field name: Field settings -> Number

Then you should apply ‘Custom’ number formatting and define color format as shown on the screenshot below. This makes the text blue:

Custom format for a Pivot table item

Below is a table of milk production data. One data item is made blue to distinguish it from the rest of the table:

Pivot table with colored texts

]]> http://www.excelrange.com/pivot-table-tip-color-all-one-type-of-data-items/feed/ 0 How to Get the Sum of Rounded Numbers “correct”? http://www.excelrange.com/how-to-get-the-sum-of-rounded-numbers-correct/ http://www.excelrange.com/how-to-get-the-sum-of-rounded-numbers-correct/#comments Mon, 14 Dec 2009 07:32:04 +0000 Märt Parker http://www.excelrange.com/?p=233 It’s quite common that the calculation adds precise numbers which are formatted to be less precise. It might also happen that due to rounding, the formatted result seems mathematically incorrect on screen.

Example:

Cell value Cell value formatted with 1 decimal
A 12,75 12,8
B 12,75 12,8
SUM A+B 25,5 25,5

The last red number seems incorrect, because 12,8 + 12,8 = 25,6

Usually this is OK, as from the source data point of view, this is mathematically correct.  But on some rare cases you want to add up numbers as they are displayed and you want the result to be 25,6. To let Excel do the math at the displayed precision level go to:

On Excel 2007: Excel Options > Advanced, scroll down to When calculating this workbook

On Excel Mac 2008: Excel -> Preferences -> Calculation

And check the field ‘Set precision as displayed‘

This should be used with caution as Excel changes the numbers in cells permanently.

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