How to Format Currency in Excel

As you work in Microsoft Excel, you’ll find yourself manipulating many categories of data. One of these likely includes currency, especially if you’re working with financial data. Fortunately, Excel offers many great ways to format and work with currency values. Let’s learn how to format currency in Microsoft Excel.

How to Format Currency in Excel

Excel works with countless currencies, including dollars, Euros, and many more. This makes it easy for you to work with financial data from around the world.

By default, cells in Excel workbooks are set to General format. General is a multi-purpose cell format, but it falls short when you’re working with specific values like currencies.

For a basic example, find an empty cell in your workbook. Click into it, and type in a dollar value:

$50

Hit Enter on your keyboard. On the Format Cells dropdown on Excel’s Home tab, you’ll see that Excel automatically recognizes $50 as a currency, and reformats the cell to Currency format. This is a great start, but you still have plenty of options available.

With the cell still selected, click on the Format Cells dropdown arrow. Then, choose More Number Formats. Excel will open the Format Cells menu, already set to the Currency category. Here, you have an array of choices available.

For example, you can specify how many decimal places to show. You can also choose to shade negative values in red, or place them in parentheses. Plus, by using the Symbol dropdown, you can change dollars to a variety of other currencies with a single click.

When you’re finished making changes and edits, go ahead and click OK. Excel will apply the selected currency formatting to your data. This is a great way to make your data more useful by controlling exactly how currency values will display.

As you can see, it’s a breeze to format currency in Excel. Use these tips any time you’re working with financial data.