How can I format bytes a cell in Excel as KB, MB, GB etc?

Question

I have a value in a cell that's in bytes. But nobody can read 728398112238. I'd rather it say 678.37GB

To write a formula to format it relatively easy (here's one: http://www.yonahruss.com/2007/02/format-excel-numbers-as-gb-mb-kb-b.html)

But is there any way to do this as a 'format'? I'd like to have the big number in the cell, but have it display as the human-readable format.

Answer 1

I don't know of a way to make it show you binary gigabytes (multiples of 1024*1024*1024) but you can make it show you decimal gigabytes using a format like:

0.00,,,"Gb"

Answer 2

You can't really do calculations in the formatting features of excel. You can use something like the following to do a rough estimation though

[<500000]#,##0" B ";[<500000000]#,##0,," MB";#,##0,,," GB"

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/conversation.aspx?messageid=34882622&amp;threadid=34882622

Answer 3

Technically a gigabyte (GB) is 10^9, not 2^30, at least according to IEEE standards. 2^30 is a gibibyte, abbreviated GiB. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte