PERCENTAGE INCREASE FORMULA IN MS EXCEL

Q1. What is the percentage increase for Wal-Mart revenue from 12 months ending 2009-01-31 compared with 12 months ending 2008-01-31? In other words, what was the percentage change for a year (January 31, 2009 compared with January 31, 2008)?

A.1 The construction of your spreadsheet is very easy.

First you went to "Google Finance" on the internet and searched for Wal-Mart.

-> you selected the "income Statement" tab;
-> you selected the "Annual Data" tab to show the annual revenues

Second, you then opened MS Excel.

Third, you copied the Income Statement of Wal-Mart from Google Finance and pasted it into MS Excel. Cool you thought, "but I cannot read what is in some of the columns". You became very annoyed.

Fourth, you widened the columns in order for you to read the titles in your spreadsheet.

Fifth, you added a new column to far right and named it something like "% increase".

Sixth, you fixed yourself a cup of tea, chilled, and came back to your computer.

Seventh, you thought to yourself "how the heck am I to come up with this formula?". One way of measuring the % increase, that came to you from sipping your tea, is to take the difference between the two numbers (columns), and then dividing it by the first one (column). You said to yourself, what I need to do is to translate this into a MS excel formula, and then just copy it and paste it in the "% increase" column.

Eighth, you developed a formula like:

=((B1-C1/C1)) formatting your cell for percentages 2 decimal points

Row 1 Column B = 12 months ending 2009-01-31 is cell reference B1

Row 1 Column C= 12 months ending 2008-01-31 is cell reference C1


* B1 equals $401,244.00
* C1 equals $374,307.00

The "% increase" column then portrayed the answer of 7.20%.

Ninth, you copied the formula down into the last column of the Income Statement of Wal-Mart.

Tenth, you admired how intelligent and insightful you were and how you can figure out anything in finance. You also thought that this was too easy.