If you can calculate percentages in Excel, It is useful. As an example, you may need to calculate the tax on a sale or the percentage of change in sales from last month to this month. This is how you do it!
Calculate the percentage increase
To start, let's calculate the increase of one value over another as a percentage.
In this example, we want to find the percentage increase in sales of a product this month compared to last month. In the next picture, you can see last month's value of 430 in cell B3 and this month's sales of 545 in cell C3.
To calculate the difference as a percentage, we subtract the value of this month from last month and then divide the result by the value of last month.
=(C3-B3)/B3
The brackets around the subtraction part of the formula ensure that the calculation occurs first.
To format the result as a percentage, Click the button “Percentage style” in the section “Number” on the Home tab.
We see that the percentage of increase is 27 percent.
If the percentage is negative, means that product sales have decreased.
Increase a value by a specific percentage
You can also increase a value by a specific percentage.
In this example, we want to increase the price of a product by five percent. To do this, we can multiply the price of the product by 1.05. This is shown in the next formula:
= B3 * 1.05
Or we could write the formula as:
= B3 * 105%
These formulas simply multiply the value by five percent more than its total. (100 percent).
Due, an increase in 20 percent would be multiplied by the 120 percent and an increase of 15 percent would be 115 percent (O 1,15).
