How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

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How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel – In many situations it can be useful to express the difference between two numbers as a percentage. This will help put the changes in a format that is more understandable to the general reader. Today I will show you how to calculate this percentage change in Excel using the Excel percentage formula.

The first thing you need to know is that to calculate the percentage change in two numbers, you need to subtract the new value from the old value and divide it by the old value.

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

Need an example? Let’s say you earned $2 in ad revenue from an article in June. In July, traffic increased significantly, earning $7. Calculate the percentage change as follows:

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At this point it should be noted that there is a difference between percentage change and percentage difference. Percentage change is used to calculate the difference between the old value and the new value.

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

A percentage difference is used when two values ​​come from similar time periods or sources. Therefore, divide by the average of the two values, not the difference between them. Today I will show you how to calculate percentage change in Excel.

Now that we’ve defined the rate of change and how it’s typically calculated, we can move on to using Excel to speed up the process. First create two columns, one with the old values ​​and one with the new values. We will use the time it takes to complete a task as an example.

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

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Now that you know how to calculate percentage change in Excel, you may be wondering how to perform other calculations. Another tutorial shows how to find the square root of a number in Excel using three different formulas.

It’s an old trick now, but applying shading (zebra stripes) to alternate rows in Excel makes the sheet easier to read. Also known as striped rows, this effect makes it easier for the eye to stay in place when scanning a spreadsheet. Let’s start with the basics and see how to calculate percentages in Excel. Note: Percentage means parts of 100.

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

In this example, we have data from a fictitious e-commerce store. The owner of this store checks how many of its daily visitors have signed up for news about sales and promotions. He eventually wants to bring these prospects into his sales and marketing teams.

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You want to calculate 1717, the percentage of total daily visitors who signed up to receive sales and promotional news.

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

When you apply percentage formatting in Excel, the value in the cell of interest is multiplied by 100. This is the first step you need to know to understand the percentage difference.

Entering data in percentage format can be very helpful for modeling accurately. Read our guide to stacked bar and column charts here.

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

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You’ll notice that the normal format applies by default. You want the numbers in column B to be displayed as percentages.

If you select cells B5:B8, go to the Number group on the Home tab and select %. We will get:

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

Because you applied the percentage format to numbers already entered in the worksheet, Excel multiplied each value by 100 to convert it to a percentage. One way to work around this is to enter the number as a decimal before changing the format.

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For example, if I type 0.7 instead of 70 in cell B5 and then apply the percentage format, it displays correctly.

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

With this range selected, go to the Home tab (Step 1 in the image) and select Percentage from the Number group (Step 2 in the image).

As a valuable form of finding information, solving percentage differences helps users analyze data in Excel.

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

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The percent difference calculation determines the absolute difference between two values ​​divided by the average of the two values. This value should be expressed as a percentage.

Both values ​​must be of the same type. For example, compare the height of two houses or the length of two sheets of paper. No value should be more important or have a higher weight than any other value.

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

3) Now, with cell B7 still selected, go to the Home tab, Number group, and apply the percentage format. Note: You can increase or decrease the number of decimal places as required.

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Let’s look at a slightly more complicated example. We are still looking for laptop brands in the same stores. We want to calculate the percentage difference between the prices of brand J and brand K. The order in which you enter the two values ​​into the formula does not matter.

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

Note: It does not matter in which order we reduce, because we are interested in the difference between the two prices, and one is not more important than the other.

This is a negative number because we subtract the price in cell B5 from the price in cell B4. You can ignore the negative sign or use Excel’s ABS function to return the absolute value of a number. In this case, we used the ABS function as part of the formula.

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

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You can now use this value for anything, such as formatting all cells with a higher percentage difference. Read our guide to conditional formatting here.

There may be times when you want to compare an old value with a new value. In these situations, use the percentage change calculation.

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

Let’s give an example. We have sales data for a fictitious plant nursery company and each salesperson recorded in January and February.

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4) Now with cells D6:D10 selected and the range selected, go to the Number group on the Home tab and select Percentage. Adjust the number of decimal places as needed.

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

5) In this case, we are interested in displaying the negative signs as well. For the first salesperson, you can see a 75% increase in sales. The previous salesperson’s sales decreased by 21%.

6) Therefore, use column E to highlight where there has been a percentage increase or decrease.

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

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9) Since we used relative cell references, we can drag the formula down the column to get:

Do you want to automate the process of calculating percentage differences? Read another great guide to creating macros in Excel.

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

If the percent difference formula returns an error, it is most likely that the cell reference is incorrect.

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So one way you can check is to select the cell with the formula and press F2 to see the reference. This will put you in edit mode. You can exit edit mode by pressing ESC.

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

This article explains how to audit Excel formulas. Read more help on this issue.

Percentage differences are a useful metric when comparing values ​​of the same type that are not mutually exclusive. Excel is known for its many uses in all areas of computational work. If you need to calculate a percentage of some value, you can also do it manually. But Excel makes this simple task even simpler. The percentage formula in Excel has values ​​in 100 as follows: a value of 80% means 80 out of 100, and 45% means 45 out of 100.

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

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Someone who always deals with numbers may need to check percentages from time to time. I handle many functions daily where percentages are calculated. For example, if a cutlery store needs to offer a discount, Excel should use a percentage formula. Alternatively, there are other situations where percentage formulas are used. Well, needless to say, percentages, whether manually or in Excel, are not a bad thing.

In Excel, among other features, there are many ways to calculate percentages. You can easily apply percentage formulas in your worksheet and it doesn’t matter if your data is long or short.

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

Everyone knows about percentage, but how the term came about is a mystery to many people. The word percent comes from the Latin per centum, meaning “one hundredth”. You should know that a percent is a fraction of 100 when the numerator is divided by the denominator and the resulting value is multiplied by 100.

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Suppose you have 20 books and a friend borrows 5 of them. How do I calculate the percentage in this situation?

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

Simply applying the calculation as 5/20*100 gives the answer as 25%. Unfortunately, I could not find a comprehensive and general formula that would cover all terms for percentages. So, let’s take a look at some of the formulas used to calculate percentages in Excel.

While parsing this formula, you notice that the “(*100)” part is missing from the percentage math formula. Because Excel applies percentages by default, you’ll see a slightly different calculation process used for percentages.

How To Calculate Percentage Difference In Excel

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