Resolved: negative numbers in brackets

Hi Moataz,

If you’ve taken our Excel course, you probably know how this works.

I recommend you to take a look at this lecture:

https://learn.365datascience.com/courses/introduction-to-microsoft-excel/introduction-to-custom-cell-formatting/

When you right click and opt for 'Format cells' you will see a window in which we communicate to Excel how to display the numbers in each cell. Go to 'Custom Formatting' to create your own preferred cell formatting. The trick you should remember is that there are four positions—each of which is separated by a semicolon or comma. The first position defines the formatting of positive numbers. The second tells Excel how to format negative numbers. In the third position, we specify how to display zeros. And in the last (fourth) position, we format text.

Two main types of placeholders (hash [#] or 0) can be used for each of the four positions. The difference between the two is that the # symbol indicates a variable number of digits to be displayed, while 0 is not so flexible.

In this case, you want to have negative numbers in brackets. This means that the second position needs to be in brackets. For example, like this (#)

To have numbers formatted in red, we need to add [Red] in front of the number.

Therefore, in the second position you would have:

[Red](#)

Hope this helps!

Best,

Ned