Question

Growth of Negative Items and Conditional Formatting

  • 24 April 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 115 views

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I’m having issues properly showing the growth and variance of negative items.

As an example, if actual EBITDA was -0.25 and budget was -1.0, I can get the difference to display correctly, but my only options for % variance are

  1. -75% (-.25- -1.0)/-1 or 
  2. +300% (-1- -.25)/-.25

Neither of those are correct.  It should be +75%.  I can use “Reverse Signs” but that doesnt apply to conditional formatting.  

Has anyone figured out a better way to show this in a table?


1 reply

Userlevel 2
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Hello @sbenkov,

I agree that the display options for negative items is less than ideal. -75% is an intuitively incorrect output for a situation where you generating higher EBITA. I don’t think any of the current selection of options fully meets your needs. Sign flipping, conditional formatting, and stacking calculated items all have a short coming that makes them less than ideal.

We encourage you to create a feature request on our ideas page here and share it with your colleagues to upvote it. Our Community Ideas Portal is our primary way of tracking enhancement requests. This allows other users to upvote Ideas and share their use cases which helps our Product Team to prioritize requests. If you’re happy to I recommend also posting your idea here for visibility (And if you do, I’ll upvote it too!)

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