Forum Discussion
Formatting Doesn't Work
Yesterday I accidentally dropped a book on my keyboard while working in excel and it completely jacked the formatting on one of my sheets. Weirdly enough, whatever happened, excel didn't recognize it as an action because the Undo button only undid my last typed entry, not the change in formatting. Despite having to go through and resize every box individually because the wrap text/auto size no longer works on that sheet, I was able to fix most of it, but my Price column still only shows numbers, not the dollar sign and 2 decimal places that I want it to show. I've tried clearing formatting for that column, changing it to text, changing it to general, changing it to currency, changing it to accounting - all resulted in no changes, the numbers still show only as numbers and not $X.00. Any thoughts on how I can get my prices to show as dollars and not just numbers?
It sounds like you are experiencing an issue where the formatting for the Price column in your Excel sheet is not displaying correctly.
One possible solution to this issue is to check if there is a custom number format applied to the cells in the Price column.
To do this, select the cells in the Price column, right-click and choose “Format Cells” from the context menu. In the “Number” tab of the “Format Cells” dialog box, select “Custom” from the “Category” list and see if there is a custom format applied to the cells.
If there is a custom format applied, you can either modify it to include the dollar sign and two decimal places or delete it and apply a different format such as “Currency” or “Accounting”.
If this does not solve the issue, you could try copying the data from the Price column into a new column and applying the desired formatting to the new column.
Otherwise the file (without sensitive data) would be appropriate to be able to see how the problem arises.
NikolinoDE Thank you, I tried that and there was not a custom format. I changed it to General under that Custom Format tab and nothing changed. Interestingly enough, when I copied the column and pasted it into a new sheet, it automatically showed the Accounting format with dollar sign and decimal and such! But when I copied that same column with the correct formatting and pasted it back into the original sheet, all of the formatting was lost and it went back to just the single number.
Here’s how you can do this:
- Select the cells in the Price column that you want to format.
- Right-click on one of the selected cells and choose Format Cells from the context menu.
- In the Format Cells dialog box, select the Number tab.
- In the Category list, select Custom.
- In the Type field, enter "$"#,##0.00.
- Click on OK to apply the custom number format to the selected cells.
This should format the numbers in the Price column to display with a dollar sign and two decimal places.
I hope this helps!
