Number format in excel: Showing % value without multiplying with 100

Question

When I set format of a cell as %, it automatically multiply the value with 100 & show the value. So 5.66 becomes 566 %.

I want to apply

Answer 1

Be aware that a value of 1 equals 100% in Excel's interpretation. If you enter 5.66 and you want to show 5.66%, then AxGryndr's hack with the formatting will work, but it is a display format only and does not represent the true numeric value. If you want to use that percentage in further calculations, these calculations will return the wrong result unless you divide by 100 at calculation time.

The consistent and less error-prone way is to enter 0.0566 and format the number with the built-in percentage format. That way, you can easily calculate 5.6% of A1 by just multiplying A1 with the value.

The good news is that you don't need to go through the rigmarole of entering 0.0566 and then formatting as percent. You can simply type

5.66%

into the cell, including the percentage symbol, and Excel will take care of the rest and store the number correctly as 0.0566 if formatted as General.