How to Calculate Percentages in Excel

Hi everyone, my name is Kevin. Today I want to show you how you can calculate percentages in Microsoft Excel, and as full disclosure before we jump into it, I work at Microsoft as a full-time employee. All right, well let's jump to it. I have an Excel spreadsheet open and we're going to run through and we're going to do some fun activities with percentages. The first thing that we're going to look at is I have these three different basketball arenas and we're going to answer some different questions related to that. The first one is we see this picture here and we want to know what percentage of the seats were occupied. And so just to take a look at this, we had 5,760 spectators and the arena has capacity for 10,000 people. Now if we were at 100% of capacity, we would be at 10,000 people. If we were over capacity, I don't know, maybe they squeezed extra people in beyond the building code, we'd be above 10,000. And if we were at zero capacity, so let's say the janitor shuts it down for the night, we'd be at zero. And so what we see here is 5,760 is somewhere in between zero and 100%. So how do we calculate the percent? Well, in Excel, what we do to calculate or to enter formulas, we always start with the equal sign. So I entered an equals. And what we're going to do is we have 5,760 spectators. So I'm going to click on cell A1, you could also type in A1. And then what we're going to do is we're going to divide by the capacity of the arena, which is 10,000. So I'm going to click on A2, I could also enter A2. And now I'm going to hit enter. And so you see that it's 57.6%. I already clicked on this percent icon and turn it into a percent. By default, it'll say 0.58. If you click on this percent icon, it'll just turn it into a percent. So we're in about 58% of capacity. So it's not the most popular game. We have a bunch of empty seats there in this picture. So moving on to another example of working with percentages. What we want to know now is how many people were in the arena if we know what percents of seats were occupied. And so in this situation, 74% of the seats were occupied, so almost a quarter. And we know that the arena has capacity for 10,000. So how many people were in the arena? Well, this one's pretty simple. What we do is we enter equals again, as we're creating a formula. And we take the percent of seats occupied, so the 74%. And now we're going to multiply this by 10,000. And so when I do that, that'll tell me that there were 7,400 people in this arena. So that's how many people were there. So given a percent and a capacity, you could figure out how many people were there. And lastly, this one's interesting. This is how big is the arena? So what we know here is that 25% of the seats were occupied and there were 2,500 people there. How do we know how big it is and how many seats there are? Well, the way we calculate this is once again, we're going to enter the equals sign. And we're going to take the number of people who were there and we're going to divide by the percent of seats that were occupied. And so when I do that, what that'll tell us is that there are 10,000 seats within this arena. And that kind of makes sense because when you have 10,000, 25% of 10,000 is 2,500. So these are given any two pieces of information, whether it's the number of spectators, the capacity, or the percentage. As long as you have two of those, you can always figure out what the third one was. And so using these three different techniques, you could figure out what that missing value is using Microsoft Excel. So it's pretty simple to calculate percentages. Excel makes it really easy where you can just enter a formula and you could calculate that. And hey, that's all I have for you. So hopefully you were able to calculate percentages. If you were, please give this video a thumbs up. If you want to see more videos like this, please hit that subscribe button. And if there are any other topics that you want me to cover, feel free to leave a comment down below and I'll add it to my list of videos to create in the future. Hey, all right. Well, thanks for tuning in. I'll see you all next time. Bye.