Welcome back. Did you have a good weekend?
We ate fish, watched a movie, had hilarious moments watching the kids and didn’t even leave the house for anything other than to buy some fish.
Coming back to Excel, I want to share a simple productivity tip with all of you. I accidentally learned this and now I use it often to speed up when I am working on large excel files.
Jump to Any Cell / Worksheet using Name Box
If you want to quickly jump to a named range or another worksheet, here is a quick trick. Just enter that name or address in the name box (top-left corner, next to formula bar). And bingo, you are on the target cell or sheet.
See this short demo to understand this trick:

Bonus tip: You can quickly access defined names using the little down arrow symbol.
Now, this would be even more useful, had I knew the keyboard shortcut for accessing namebox. Alas, I end up moving my mouse pointer to the name box instead.
If you know the keyboard shortcut to access the namebox, share it using comments. Also, share with us, how you simplify navigation in excel using various shortcuts and tricks.
Stuff that can make you productive: Quick, bite sized excel tips, excel keyboard shortcuts, using mouse in excel














11 Responses to “Fix Incorrect Percentages with this Paste-Special Trick”
I've just taught yesterday to a colleague of mine how to convert amounts in local currency into another by pasting special the ROE.
great thing to know !!!
Chandoo - this is such a great trick and helps save time. If you don't use this shortcut, you have to take can create a formula where =(ref cell /100), copy that all the way down, covert it to a percentage and then copy/paste values to the original column. This does it all much faster. Nice job!
I was just asking peers yesterday if anyone know if an easy way to do this, I've been editing each cell and adding a % manually vs setting the cell to Percentage for months and just finally reached my wits end. What perfect timing! Thanks, great tip!
If it's just appearance you care about, another alternative is to use this custom number format:
0"%"
By adding the percent sign in quotes, it gets treated as text and won't do what you warned about here: "You can not just format the cells to % format either, excel shows 23 as 2300% then."
Dear Jon S. You are the reason I love the internet. 3 year old comments making my life easier.
Thank you.
Here is a quicker protocol.
Enter 10000% into the extra cell, copy this cell, select the range you need to convert to percentages, and use paste special > divide. Since the Paste > All option is selected, it not only divides by 10000% (i.e. 100), it also applies the % format to the cells being pasted on.
@Martin: That is another very good use of Divide / Multiply operations.
@Tony, @Jody: Thank you 🙂
@Jon S: Good one...
@Jon... now why didnt I think of that.. Excellent
Thank You so much. it is really helped me.
Big help...Thanks
Thanks. That really saved me a lot of time!
Is Show Formulas is turned on in the Formula Ribbon, it will stay in decimal form until that is turned off. Drove me batty for an hour until I just figured it out.