Beginners Guide to Entering Percentages, Currency, Dates & Other Common Types of Data in Excel

Text may be typed or pasted directly into the cell. Anything that includes an alphabetic letter or symbol is considered to be text.

For example, Excel treats Fred Smith, A-Z and A123 as text.

Text will be left-aligned by default. 

Numbers should be entered into a cell without any additional characters. For example, 20,000 should be entered as 20000 (i.e. without the comma thousand separator).

Numbers are right-aligned by default so that each unit (singles, tens, hundreds etc.) are underneath each other.

Currency should be entered into a cell without any additional characters such as dollar signs, commas or spaces.

For example, $199.99 should be entered as 199.99. Then, if you click the $ icon half way along the Home ribbon, your number will be converted to dollars and cents.

Currency figures have 2 decimal places and are right-aligned by default so that each unit (singles, tens, hundreds etc.) are underneath each other.

To show only whole dollars, click the Decrease Decimal icon twice (4 icons along from the $ icon).

Dates should be entered using a slash (‘/’) to separate the day, month and year.

Do not use the full stop (‘.’) as the separator as Excel will treat it as a decimal point and will probably give an error.

It does not matter whether the year is entered as a two-digit or a four-digit year.

A shortcut to enter today's date into a cell is Ctrl ;. This date is static which means it will never change.

This formula calculates the current date: =TODAY(). This date is dynamic (will always be current).

If, for example you are calculating somebody's age, you need a static date (their date of birth) and a dynamic date (the current day).

Time should be entered using a colon (:) to separate the hours, minutes and seconds. Do not use the full stop (‘.’) as the separator.

Time can be used as a clock time (e.g. an employee starts their shift at 8am [08:00] or as a duration (e.g. a shift lasts for 7 hours and 30 minutes [7:30] ).

A shortcut to enter the current time into a cell is Ctrl Shift ;.

This formula calculates the current time dynamically: =NOW(). 

To enter percentages, simply follow the number with percent sign (‘%’) which can be entered by pressing  Shift 5.

When a percentage sign is used, the number is automatically formatted to a percentage, rather than a plain number.

Each percentage has an equivalent decimal number which always falls between 0 and 1.

You cannot use the % button on the Home ribbon to format a number from decimal to a percentage because Excel multiplies the number by 100 to give the percentage. \

For example, if you convert 325 into a percentage, it becomes 32500%, because 325 is 325 times the value of 1 (100%).

There are lots of different kinds of data that can be entered into a cell. The most common types are text, numbers, currency/accounting, percentage, date and time.