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Hi Reader,

Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #360, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form!

Last week I shared that I'm working on a new online course called Modern Google Sheets. I've now recorded 90% of the videos and edited about 65% of them so it's progressing well. After they're finished, I'll upload them to Teachable (the online school platform), prepare the templates, and add some challenge questions.

I'm excited to get this course out into the world, because it's bang up to date and shows you how to make the most of all the new features in Sheets like Tables and AI.

​Join the waitlist to get the inside scoop and progress updates.

Switching gears, today's tip is cool.

It's a secret property of the humble "%" symbol. Check it out below.

But first, news from the world of spreadsheets and a message from today's sponsor...

➜ News

I.
​This will be relevant to some of you: Google announce a way for admins to decrypt client-side encrypted content, after an export using Vault or Takeout.

​Read more here >>​

II.
​Rows, one of the newer spreadsheet tools, recently published their first AI spreadsheet benchmark test, comparing the performance of Rows, Excel, Sheets, and a couple of other spreadsheet applications on AI-led tasks.

I applaud their decision to make it fully transparent by sharing their methodology and making the dataset and questions downloadable through Hugging Face, so we can recreate any of the tests ourselves.

Check out the full results and methodology:

​Read the spreadsheet AI benchmark test here >>​

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➜ Sheets Tip #360: The Hidden Secret of the % Symbol

In this tip, we look at the humble percent symbol "%" and what it does in our Sheets.

If we type "6%" into a cell of Google Sheets, it displays as 6%. No surprise there.

Now, if we type "=6%" into a cell, then it will (probably) display as 0.06 in your cell, which is 6% in decimal notation. (We can easily change it to display as a percent under the menu: Format > Number > Percent)

The % sign, known technically as a post-fix operator, divides the number to the left of it by 100.

It works with cell references too.

E.g. Divide A1 by 100:

And, this is the secret trick, we can even combine multiple % to divide by larger numbers.

E.g. Divide A1 by 10,000:

The brackets are required for this to work.

E.g. Divide A1 by 1,000,000:

In our Sheet, it looks like this:

Interesting!

How can we use this?

Well, it lets us write formulas like this:

where "salesTax" is a named range that points to a cell with the sales tax rate number in. (Be careful that if you write the "%" inside your formula like this that you don't also apply it in the "salesTax" cell.)

We can also combine it with arrays, e.g. this ArrayFormula and SEQUENCE example, to divide all numbers by 10:

This creates the array:

0.01
0.02
0.03
...
0.10

Let me know if you find any useful applications for this % trick!

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please forward it to a friend who might enjoy it.

Have a great week!

Cheers,
Ben

P.S. Most relatable email ever sent...​