This article will give you the formula to calculate the percentage of increase or decrease.
When is it helpful to calculate the percentage of increase?
You have the following document where you have the total sales per month. How to calculate the increase or decrease from one month to the next one?
Percentage Calculation method
1. Subtraction between 2 months
The first thing to do is to see the difference between 2 consecutive months. The formula is very simple
=B3-B2
And, of course, you copy this formula for the other cells.
2. Divide the substation by the next month's value
To calculate the percentage of increase, we will
- Use the result of the subtraction
- Divide it by the sales amount of the previous month.
=C3/B2
Apply the percentage format
Now, you must change the format number to percentage from the Home ribbon.
And copy the percentage formula for the rest of your document
Between February and March, the increase is up to 38.7% (great result 😃😍)
Write the formula in a single cell
In mathematics, it's important to respect the order of operations. Addition and subtraction do not have the same priority as multiplication and division. This is why, to perform the subtraction before the division, we must write the subtraction in parentheses.
=(B3-B2)/B2
Conditional formatting with icon
To highlight the increase and decrease, inserting icons with conditional formatting is a good idea.
