When dealing with large spreadsheets in Excel 2010, it is important to be able to identify the information that is more important than the rest of the information. In some cases, such as a budget or a sales report, this could be situations where sales have decreased, or expenses may exceed income. Excel will handle negative numbers by placing a “-” sign in front of them, but you may find that this is not enough. Fortunately you can also adjust the formatting in your spreadsheet so that the numbers are automatically displayed with a red font.
Automatically Format Negative Numbers with Red Text in Excel 2010
Of course you could always go through and manually change the color of the text to red, but that is both tedious and prone to potential mistakes. The method described below is simple and automatic, and you can even choose to apply it to your entire worksheet so that additional negative number entries are formatted correctly. So continue reading below to learn how to make negative numbers red in Excel 2010.
Step 1: Open your worksheet in Excel 2010.
Step 2: Highlight the cells containing the information that you want to format with the automatic red font for negative numbers.
Step 2: Click the Home tab at the top of the window.
Step 3: Click the Format Cells: Number button at the bottom-right corner of the Number section of the ribbon.
Step 4: Select the Number or Currency option from the list at the left side of the window. Note that choosing the currency option will place a $ sign in front of any number in the spreadsheet.
Step 5: Select the 1234.10 option under Negative numbers, then click the OK button.
When you return to your spreadsheet you will notice that all of your negative numbers are now displayed in red, like in the image below.
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