Let's say that your earnings are $2,342 in November and $2,500 in December. 2. Please advise. To format the number as a percentage, click the Number Format dropdown menu on . We can calculate the percentage change of any data in terms of other data. Hit Enter. After the criteria are defined, we need to calculate the total marks of students and the percentage achieved by the students. How much do you have to pay for the sales tax? Here is the generally used formula to calculate the percent difference: In math, you'd normally perform 3 steps to calculate the percentage variance between any two numeric values: In Excel, you skip the last step by applying the Percentage format. If some of your values are represented by negative numbers, the traditional percent difference formula will work incorrectly.