Excel Number Format Code Builder
Pick your options, get the format code, and see exactly how it renders right beside it.
Built for the moment the Custom box in Format Cells stops you. Choose decimals and a style for negatives and the code is written for you, with a live preview of how it renders. Paste a code you already have to see what it means. Nothing you enter leaves this screen.
Common codes
Format code
Renders as
1,234,568
Four sections
A code splits on semicolons into at most four sections, in the order positive, negative, zero, text. That is the rule in Microsoft's documentation, and a section you leave out falls back to an earlier one.
- Positive
- #,##0
The same m means month and minute
Microsoft's date code table lists m for months (1-12) and for minutes (0-59). The documentation gives no rule for telling them apart, so this page treats m as minutes when it follows an hour code or precedes a seconds code, and as months otherwise. That is a widely used rule, but it is this page's choice, so it says so.
Nothing you entered was sent anywhere. Everything was calculated on this screen.
The preview is drawn by this page
It is not a screenshot of Excel. It is this page re-applying the rules from Microsoft's documentation. That is why codes it cannot handle are reported plainly instead of being approximated. For anything that matters, check it once in Excel.
Sources
How Excel custom number formats workMade alongside
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