Four common cell styles required are percent, date, multiple, and hard code. To get into these, you hit Alt + HJ. That brings up your cell styles. Then you find the one you're after, such as percents. You right click on it and then modify. What we need to modify for a percent is just the number, and the format we want is firstly, for a positive number, we want one decimal place. That's 0.0. Secondly, you then want a percentage sign to be shown. And thirdly, you want an underscore closed bracket. That means you're going to leave a space the size of a closed bracket. After the semicolon, you've then got your negative number that will be shown with brackets around it. You'll then have 0.0, so one decimal place again, and then the percentage sign.

Next up, a date. So for the date, we want that to be formatted as dd-mmm, then yy. So what does that mean? Will the two Ds means that the day of the month will be shown as, for instance, 01 for the first of the month. You'll then have a dash rather than a slash or anything else. Three Ms mean you'll have three letters shown for the month. So January will be shown as Jan. And then two Ys means your year will be shown as two numbers. So for instance, if you were looking at 2030, you'll just have the 30 shown.

A third common cell style is multiple. So for instance, if you wanted to have multiple shown in Excel, such as a multiple of debt to EBITDA, maybe you think a company's maximum debt will be five times its EBITDA, then we need to have an X shown after our number. So a positive number will be shown as hash comma hash hash. That means it'll have a thousand separator. You'll then have 0.0 to indicate that you'll have one decimal place, and then you'll leave a space. After that, you'll have the X. And then lastly, you want a space left the size of a closed bracket. After the semicolon, we then have what a negative multiple will be shown as. So it'll have brackets around it. It'll have the thousand separator, it'll have one decimal place, and then a space, X. Lastly, a hard coded number is often formatted in a certain way so that it's obvious to users that these are hard codes and not links to other cells or formulas. In this case, we don't want to change the number. We just want to change the font, and that's the color that we want to change in there. So we'll change that to blue. And if you're very particular about this, we want to go in and change the RGB or the red green blue setting to 0, 0, and 255.