Monday, July 27, 2009

Please use "thousands" formatting when doing Excel models

Drives me crazy when entrepreneurs create financial models with "/1000" in order to create a format to show a worksheet in thousands.

Don't do that! Makes editing the modeling really risky because it's hard to trace where this formula has been applied.

Just use a custom number format to show the numbers in thousands as necessary. Here's one that works:

_($* #,##0,_);_($* (#,##0,);_($* "-"_);_(@_)

Ok?