How to Highlight Negative Numbers on Excel?

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For multiple negative percentages or numbers in your Excel worksheet, it is hard to find them immediately when you browse the worksheet. You can mark all negative percentages or numbers by custom formatting the selected cells or conditional formatting them all at once.

Including negative numbers, you can easily spot and highlight important facts about your data with Excel’s formatting features. Losses are usually displayed in red numbers in financial reports, such as company profit and loss statements. You can display negative values in any color that is convenient for you by using the same way.

When browsing your Excel worksheet, it can be challenging to locate negative numbers if it contains many negative numbers right away. You can mark all negative numbers in red by custom formatting the selected cells or conditionally formatting all of them at once. In Excel, you can highlight and keep only specific data in the data set in various ways (such as using conditional formatting, inbuilt number formatting, etc.) to highlight and mark only particular numbers in the current worksheet. This risewindows article will guide you on how to highlight negative numbers in excel.

How to Highlight Cells with Negative Values using Conditional Formatting?

If the value in a cell is less than zero (0), that will be a negative number. So, we can highlight it in a specified color (red in this example) based on Excel Conditional Formatting rules. Here is how to do it.

Step 1. Firstly, you’ll need to select a range of cells that contain the numbers.

Step 2. Click on the Home tab in the menu bar.

Step 3. Then, click the Conditional Formatting button in the Styles group.

Step 4. After that, select Highlight Cells Rules > Less Than in the drop-down menu.

Step 5. Next, a “Less Than” dialog box will appear on the screen. Click the drop-down arrow and select a highlight option, for example, Light red fill with dark red text.

Step 6. So, specify the value 0 in the text box.

Step 7. Finally, click the OK button to close the dialog box.

After completing all the steps, all the cells with negative numbers will turn red, while the positive numbers will remain unchanged.

How to Highlight Cells with Negative Numbers using Custom Number Formats?

To highlight negative numbers, excel allows users to create their custom format in Excel. Perform the following steps:-

Step 1. Firstly, choose the cells where you want to highlight negative numbers in red.

Step 2. Click on the Home tab in the menu bar.

Step 3. Then, click the small arrow button under the Number group or press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + 1 to open the Format Cells dialog box.

Step 4. After that, switch to the Number tab and select Custom on the left pane.

Step 5. Then, in the “Type” box, type the following:-

General;[Red]-General

Step 6. Finally, click the OK button.

Once you complete this process, all cells with negative numbers will turn red, while those with positive numbers will remain unchanged.

That’s it for the article.

I hope this post will be informative to you.

Good luck & keep growing, guys.

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