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Dollar

The Dollar function in Excel works in a similar way to the text function. So to explain it, here we have got a Salesperson and some Sales – you can see we have formatted it in currency terms but the number itself is just a normal number. If you try and do a concatenate ie what we are trying to do is join this into a sentence, saying  this person sold this much- you’ll see what happens is Excel reverts back to the number it recognizes so it doesn’t have the nice formatting around here.  What dollar allows you to do, you’ll see here we have created the dollar – all we are telling it is look at a  certain number, in this case here, and how many decimals.  Excel creates the text version of what it sees here. What we can now do is if we link to that cell instead of the original number cell, Excel now sees the number not as a number but actually as text and formats it in exactly the same way you want it to be formatted. So all it is actually doing is converting a number into some sort of text with the formatting so that when you want to use it in, for example, a concatenate, you can actually get the formatting correct. Again its worthwhile looking at the text function to compare to the dollar function.