Reader Question:
Formatting excel cells to include a Dollar ($) sign

Hi Jonathan,

You’ve stumbled across something that needs a bit of explanation.

Excel cells are great at storing specific types of information and doing really powerful stuff with the information stored within them (especially numbers).  In order to be able to apply mathematical functions to numbers (like adding, subtracting etc), the program usually needs the information in its cells to be stored in a single format - for example, numbers only or characters only. This is because mathematical functions can only be performed on numbers. While cells can contain combinations of characters and numbers, if you (or someone else) has previously told Excel that it will only want to display numbers in a row or column, it may try and hide the character component of anything you add - in this case the "$" sign.

If you want a row or a column of cells to be “$” signed, simply select the cells (with plain numbers in them) which you want and right click on them. Select Format Cells from the menu that appears and then in the Numbers tab select Currency from the category list and press OK. Excel now knows to both insert a “$” sign if one doesn’t exist before a number, but more importantly knows that it should ignore the “$” sign when it’s performing calculations.