How to Have Microsoft Windows 2007 Excel Automatically Enter Commas in Spreadsheet Number Cells

I've used Excel a million times.  I'm pretty good at it but every once in a while I get stuck on the simplest of commands.  

We recently started using Windows 2007. I was working on an Excel spreadsheet and I wanted to have Excel automatically add commas to numbers in cells instead of having to do it myself manually.  In other words, all of the numbers I had like "1000" and "25000" I wanted to appear as "1,000" and "25,000"

I've always done this using the "Numbers" format function but for some reason I had a mental lapse and couldn't figure it out.  Not believing I could be so dopey, I presumed  Windows 2007 did not allow you to auto-enter commas via the "numbers" formatting function like on older versions.   As an alternative, I used the "custom" function to add commas.  It worked so well that I egotistically decided to write an article to "show" the world how to do this.  

Of course, I was completely wrong about the "Numbers" format. You can easily use this to add commas and I'm telling the world nothing new here :- )  That said, I already wrote the article and, because I'm a vain and stubborn man, I figured I would share it anyway. 

This article will teach you to use both the "Numbers" format and "Custom" format to add commas to numbers in spreadsheet cells.

Open Excel and the spreadsheet you want to work on.

(also... please forgive my pictures, I'm a klutz with screen shots, notebook pastes,sizing, etc... so I took photos of the screen... apologies in advance! If you've got a great hub on that topic, let me know :-)

Highlight the cell, cells, row or column where you want commas to appear in your number(s).

With the cells highlighted, right click your mouse.  A small window will appear.  Click on "Format Cells.

A window will appear with the word "general" highlighted.

From here there are two ways to do this, you can select "Number" or "Custom."  Both are located below in the same column as "General"

If you use the "Number" Option just follow steps a through c.

a) Click on "Number"

b) Just to the right of "number" you see "decimal places" and just below that you'll see the "1000 separator". Click the small box titled "use the 1000 separator (,)" so that a check box appears inside of the box .

c) Click OK .

Your numbers in the highlighted cells will automatically have commas filled in

Custom is a cool step. You can use this to simply add commas as well as to add $ signs in combination with commas.

a) Click on "Custom" (it is in the same column as "number" except further down.

b) Select the "#,###" option or any of the nine other options below it depending on how you want the format to appear.

c) Click OK

Your numbers in the selected cells will show with commas filled in.

I hope that helps you to quickly add commas to your number cells in Excel.

Thanks for stopping by.