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  • 8 months ago
Discover how to display accounting format as 0, not -. Essentially an answer to How to make accounting format show 0. Or how do I change my accounting number format? Some people have asked as how do I change the default accounting format in Excel?

Method 1 - Cell Format Currency
1) Select Paid Sum column
2) Ctrl + 1
3) Number tab
4) Currency
5) OK

Method 2 - Cell Format Custom
1) Select Paid Sum column
2) Ctrl + 1
3) Number tab
4) Custom
5) _-$* #,##0.00_-;-$* #,##0.00_-;_-$* 0.00_-;_-@_-
6) OK

Lets break it down what the custom cell format type mean.
_-$* #,##0.00_-;-$* #,##0.00_-;_-$* 0.00_-;_-@_-

_-$* #,##0.00-;
This section defines the format for positive numbers. It includes a currency symbol ($) and displays the number with a thousands separator (,) and two decimal places. If the number is positive, it will be displayed in this format.

-$* #,##0.00_-;
This section defines the format for negative numbers. It is similar to the positive number format but includes a minus sign (-) before the currency symbol to indicate a negative value.

_-$* 0.00-;
This section defines the format for zero (0) values. It displays a zero (0) with the currency symbol and two decimal places.

_-@_-
This section defines the format for text. It displays the text as it is without any additional formatting.

If you're just curious of what the original accounting cell format Custom type means, here is the explanation.
_-$* #,##0.00_-;-$* #,##0.00_-;_-$* "-"??_-;_-@_-

_-$* #,##0.00-;
This section defines the format for positive numbers. It includes a currency symbol ($) and displays the number with a thousands separator (,) and two decimal places. If the number is positive, it will be displayed in this format.

-$* #,##0.00_-;
This section defines the format for negative numbers. It is similar to the positive number format but includes a minus sign (-) before the currency symbol to indicate a negative value.

-$* "-"??-
This section represents the format for zero values.The _$ adds a currency symbol (e.g., $) at the beginning. The * allows space for an optional additional character. The "-" displays a hyphen (-) for zero values. The ?? displays two question marks for zero values.
Transcript
00:00Let's say, for instance, if you have a series of numbers like this, and you want to put a currency in front of this number, what you do is that you select all the numbers like this, and you go home, number, there's a dollar sign here, click on this dollar sign, and you can see that it introduces a dollar sign in front of the numeric value.
00:18But what's annoying about this is that anything that was zero previously is showing as a dash here, how to get around it. Well, there's two ways to do it. The first way is to highlight all your dollar value again one more time, and then after that, press CTRL-1 to open the cell formatting window here. Make sure you're on the number tab, and instead of accounting, you're going to select currency, and then you click OK.
00:43But one thing bad about that is that you can see that your currency sign or your dollar here, for this instance, is actually stuck to the numeric value. It's not flush to the left like what we had previously.
00:56Let me undo this here, and I'll show you what I mean. CTRL-Z to undo. You see how this is flushed nicely. How do you get around it? Well, there's another way to do it.
01:04First, you highlight all the dollar value again one more time. Press CTRL-1 to open format cell like this again, and instead of currency or accounting, you're going to be selecting custom like this, and what you have to edit here would be this one here, where there's double-quote dash, double-quote question, question. You're going to replace that characters with 0.00.
01:27If you'd like to understand what each of these funny characters means, I'll leave in my description what it means. Please do look at it. Once you enter those details in there, click OK, and now you can see that everything has a dollar sign that's flush to the left, and now instead of dash, it's showing actual 0 itself.
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