Displaying Lakhs and Crores in Excel

Here's a useful Excel tip for users in India and other places that use number formats like 100,00,00,000 instead of 1,000,000,000:

You may have faced the problem of Excel always displaying amounts in millions and not in lakhs e.g. 1,000,000 instead of 10,00,000. Here's a trick to get them to display correctly:

Right-click on the cells which you want to display as lakhs, and click on Format Cells, then go to the Custom category and enter the below formats:
For Lakhs (+ve and -ve):

With 2 decimals:

[>99999]##\,##\,##0.00;[<-99999.99]-##\,##\,##0.00;##,##0.00

Without decimals:

[>99999]##\,##\,##0;[<-99999.99]-##\,##\,##0;##,##0

For Lakhs and crores (+ve)

[>9999999]##\,##\,##\,##0.00;[>99999]##\,##\,##0.00;##,##0.00

For Lakhs and crores (-ve)

[<-9999999](##\,##\,##\,##0.00);[<-99999](##\,##\,##0.00);##,##0.00

There is an easier way to change the global settings from Settings > Control Panel > Regional Settings > Numbers, but that will affect all your Excel sheets and the change will be visible only on your system and not on your files which you send to others.
Happy XL-ing 🙂