Either manually or through one of the many functions or formulas that Microsoft Excel offers us, we have the possibility of carrying out all kinds of calculations. Not surprisingly, this is an application that focuses precisely on working with numerical data and is part of the Office suite. Now we will see how to calculate percentages.
This means that the program that we mentioned is accompanied by others as important as Word or PowerPoint. This is a solution that allows us both to carry out basic accounts on a personal level, and to manage the accounting of an entire company. To a great extent, everything will depend on the knowledge and experience we have with Excel. Next, we are going to talk about two ways to calculate something as elementary as a percentage . It goes without saying that we carry out this type of calculation in all types of projects, both large and small.
On many occasions we can calculate this percentage in a simple way by making a rule of three in our heads. But if the values we have to deal with are high or somewhat complex, things get complicated. In addition, this type of operation can be part of a more important spreadsheet project, for which the program can help us.
Calculate percentage in Excel with a cell format
First of all, we are going to carry out this calculation with the help of Microsoft’s own calculation program. To do this, in the sheet itself we are going to enter both data , that is, the value with which we are going to operate and the percentage that we want to obtain. As an example, here we are going to find out how much 15% of 500 is. Therefore, in a box we enter the second value in the conventional way. But when we type the percentage in another cell, we must make sure to select the percentage data type in Start / Number / Percentage.
Next, we go to the cell in which we want the percentage calculation to be reflected as such. Then we will have to multiply the two boxes in which we place the previous values. To give us an idea of what we are telling you, in the case that concerns us here, this would be the format:
=C3*D3
At that moment, the last cell where we have located ourselves will show the desired percentage, that is, in this case 15% of 500. Obviously this is something that we can carry out with all the values that we need or require, for which Excel makes it pretty easy.
Perform the calculation manually
But this same operation to calculate the percentage of any value is something that we can also carry out by hand from this same program. We start from the basis that we want to perform the same percentage calculation as in the previous case. This means that with the formula that we are going to show you below we will directly calculate the 15% corresponding to the value 500. Well, once again we place ourselves in the cell where we want to obtain the result. Here we will not need to enter the initial values anywhere else:
=500*15/100
This means that, to calculate a certain percentage of any other value, we only have to change the numbers 500 and 15 of the example shown.
