Spreadsheets are often used to represent numbers that relate to currency and as a result you may want to change currency format in Excel on a regular basis. The easiest way to do this on a permanent basis is via the ‘Format cells’ option (right click on a cell and choose ‘Format cells’.

However, sometimes you want the currency format to change depending on the contents of a cell e.g. if cell A1 says dollars I want row 1 to be formatted as US dollars.

You can achieve this by using conditional formatting. One of the options you can use is to format the cells based on a formula and one of the format types is the Number format. This way by changing a single descriptive cell you can change the currency format.