Percentage change
New minus old, divided by old — and why the order matters.
Task:
Year-end review: for each cost line, put the change from last year to this year as a percentage of last year in D2:D6. A rise should come out positive and a fall negative.
Hints
+5 XPno-hints bonusSolve it on your own to keep the bonus. Each hint gets one step closer to the formula.
Variations of Percentage Calculations
0/4The same formula in the other shapes it takes at work.
- Percentage Calculations
Calculate percentages using basic arithmetic.
CoreIntermediate - Percentage change
New minus old, divided by old — and why the order matters.
Intermediate - Add a percentage to a price
Price × (1 + rate), with the rate kept in one cell.
Beginner - Take a percentage back out
Recover the net price from a gross one — and why subtracting 20% is wrong.
Intermediate
The data in this exercise
This is the grid you start with. Cell references in the task — B6, C2 — point at the row numbers and column letters below.
| A | B | C | D | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cost | Last year | This year | Change |
| 2 | Rent | 36000 | 37800 | |
| 3 | Energy | 8400 | 10920 | |
| 4 | Insurance | 4200 | 3990 | |
| 5 | Software | 5600 | 5600 | |
| 6 | Travel | 12500 | 9375 |
What this exercise teachesMay contain the answer
A percentage change is always relative to where you started. Dividing by this year instead understates every rise and overstates every fall, and =C2-B2/B2 without brackets is not a percentage at all — it divides B2 by itself and takes 1 off this year's figure.