OK, this is not what you think. I know one can easily format a large number like 7,000,000 as 7 M, but I'm looking to do the reverse. Our financial department uses the numbers to represent millions, to 7.5 is really 7,500,000. Our department needs to deal with the actual numbers, not the numbers in millions. That's because we're working at a smaller level of granularity and 0.5 might not seem like a lot to the overall company, but since it represents 500,000, that value is a lot to our department.
As a workaround, we simply create a duplicate "table" of values and in each cell of the new "table", we multiply the corresponding cell in the old "table" by 1 million. It's a silly workaround, but effective.
I haven't come across any more elegant way to do this, and haven't seen anything in my Google searches, probably because everyone has the opposite problem of formatting large numbers as small ones. I use the word table in quotes because it's not a real table, but it shouldn't matter even if it was.
Any ideas?
Hi Scotty,
As I see it you are on the right track: converting is the way to do it.
You can automise that maybe with VBA/Macro or try to duplicate and multiply as clever as possible.
Don't know if you want to have some ideas of us about that? It seems now you do this cell by cell, but maybe that isn't the way you do it?
Frans
Hi Scotty,
Having to multiply the values by 1M is a risky solution as errors could easily creep in, but I'm not aware of any way to reverse this other than the approach you already use.
Your company is obviously large and I'm confident your accounting system stores the values in absolute terms i.e. not converted to millions (I used to work in investment banking. We dealt with figures in M or B for reporting purposes, but our systems still stored the figures in their unformatted state). I would go back to your accounting department and ask for them to provide the figures without the formatting.
Mynda
Hi Scotty
I agree with Mynda. Multiplying the values by 1M is very risky.
Anyhow if you just want to format the values (not changing the actual value) you can refer to the link below to give you some ideas:
https://chandoo.org/wp/custom-number-formats-multiply-divide-by-any-power-of-10/
Good luck.
Sunny
Nice link you found Sunny!
I'll try that out to see if it also works in the Dutch version of Excel (you know sometimes…..).
Thanks
Frans
Thanks all,
I just wanted to point out that in this particular application of converting a small number to a large number, there is no risk in doing that. The reason is that the small number (that we receive from our financial dept) has all the significant digits down to cents. So, an actual value of 1,234,567.89 will be delivered to us in a spreadsheet with a value of 1.23456789. When we reconstitute it, and turn that small number back to a large number, we multiply it by 1 million and then get the actual number we wanted in the first place.
-Scotty81
That wasn't the risk I was referring to. The risk is that you have a formula error, or miss converting one of the values in the first instance. You'd hope that this would be obvious, but that would depend on how complex your spreadsheets are.
