I'm trying to keep track of my daily sales at work and compare them to last years sales in an excel spreadsheet. I can't however, for the life of me, remember how to use the functions to do what I want.
For example... Say today I did $2735, and last year I did $2825, whats the function I use to make it tell me that I was up/down such and such %.
I'm going crazy! It's been a while since I've used excel.

 

If my math is correct I should be down ~3.18%, right? I just want the damn spreadsheet to figure it out for when I just type in the numbers.

 

I figured it out.

Does anyone know how to mess with the percentages to make the negative ones automatically appear red? I don't see any way to manipulate the color of the percentages.

 

Set up conditional formating. I believe it is under format cells.

 

There is more than one way to do it, but the easiest is to use Conditional Formatting.

It's one of the choices under formatting. Once you open that tab it is pretty self explanatory.

You can make all negative numbers appear red, or highight the cell, or many other ways to draw your eye to the negative numbers.

ETA - Bent6 beat me to it.

 

Thanks guys. It's all starting to come back to me now.

 

I just go to the Format menu, choose format cells,





and choose from the options:



This way you can have it display only selected cells or all of it if you want, and mix and match formats if you desire.

Point and click. Easy.