Page 106 - Excel 2013 All-in-One For Dummies

88 It Takes All Kinds (Of Cell Entries) What’s the value?
In a typical spreadsheet, numbers (or numeric data entries) can be as prevalent as the text entries — if not more so. This is because traditionally, spreadsheets were developed to keep financial records, which included plenty of extended item totals, subtotals, averages, percentages, and grand totals. Of course, you can create spreadsheets that are full of numbers that have nothing to do with debits, credits, income statements, invoices, quar- terly sales, and dollars and cents.
Number entries that you make in your spreadsheet can be divided into three categories:
✦ Numbers that you input directly into a cell. (You can do this with the keyboard, your voice if you use the Speech Recognition feature, or even by handwriting if your keyboard is equipped with a writing tablet.)
✦ Date and time numbers that are also input directly into a cell but are automatically displayed with the default Date and Time number formats and are stored behind the scenes as special date serial and hour decimal numbers.
✦ Numberscalculatedbyformulasthatyoubuildyourselfbyusingsimple arithmetical operators and/or Excel’s sophisticated built-in functions.
Inputting numbers
Numbers that you input directly into the cells of the worksheet — whether they are positive, negative, percentages, or decimal values representing dollars and cents, widgets in stock, workers in the Human Resources depart- ment, or potential clients — don’t change unless you specifically change them, either by editing their values or replacing them with other values. This is quite unlike formulas with values that change whenever the worksheet is recalculated and Excel finds that the values upon which they depend have been modified.
When inputting numbers, you can mix the digits 0–9 with the following key- board characters:
+ – () $ . , %
You use these characters in the numbers you input as follows:
✦ Preface the digits of the number with a plus sign (+) when you want
to explicitly designate the number as positive, as in +(53) to convert negative 53 into positive 53. Excel considers all numbers to be positive unless you designate them as negative.