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When you want to know how much your sales have increased or how much your bills have decreased, you can calculate a percentage difference in Google Sheets.
With a simple formula, you can see the percentage increase or decrease between your values. You can also format the result as a percentage or a whole number, automatically or manually.
RELATED: How to Calculate Percentage in Google Sheets
Calculate a percentage increase or decrease
To calculate the difference between two values ​​as a percentage, you’ll use a basic formula. the syntax is (new_value - original_value)/original_value or the new value minus the original value with the result divided by the original value.
RELATED: How to Find the Percent Difference Between Values ​​in Excel
For example, we want to find the percentage difference in our sales from January to February. We can see that some sales went up while others went down. You would use this formula:
=(C2-B2)/B2
The result is -0.25 or negative 25 percent. The formula explains decreases by placing a negative symbol in front of the result.
To get a positive result, we’ll use our next product and the same formula with updated cell references:
=(C3-B3)/B3
This time our result is 0.08 or 8 percent.
If you prefer to display your results as percentages rather than decimals, you can do this automatically with a slight change to the formula, or manually using the tools in Google Sheets.
Automatically format percentage
Google Sheets offers a useful function to convert numbers to percentages. The function is TO_PERCENT and the syntax is TO_PERCENT(value) where the argument can be a number or a cell reference.
By adding the function to the beginning of the percentage formula that converts to the value, you’ll see your result automatically formatted for you.
=TO_PERCENT((C2-B2)/B2)
Remember to enclose the entire original formula in parentheses when using the TO_PERCENT function.
RELATED: 9 Basic Google Sheets Features You Should Know
Manually format the percentage
If you’ve already entered the percentage formulas in your sheet and don’t want to change them, you can simply format the results as percentages.
Select the cell(s) containing the results and do one of the following:
- Click the Format as Percentage button on the toolbar.
- Choose “Percentage” from the More Formats drop-down list on the toolbar.
- Select Format > Number > Percentage from the menu.
Alternative formula for a percentage change
There is another formula you can use that is similar to the first one. This multiplies the result by 100, thus giving you a formatted decimal number. You can use this if you don’t necessarily need to display the percent symbol.
RELATED: How to change and create a custom number format in Google Sheets
Using our same examples above, you would use this formula:
=(C2-B2)/B2*100
Now instead of displaying our result as -0.25, it displays as -25.00 or negative 25 percent.
The same works for our second example, giving us a positive result of 8.00 or 8 percent.
=(C3-B3)/B3*100
Calculating the percentage difference between your values ​​can give you a quick and clear picture of how the numbers change. For more information, take a look at how to make negative numbers red in Google Sheets.
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