Dumb maths/excel question

[ILikeDinosaurs]

How do I turn a thousand into a billion? Ie where do I put the decimal place - say for 85,057 - would it be 0.0085057?

How would I change it in excel?

Please be gentle with me, I am rubbish with anything to do with numbers ! I need a really simple explanation. thanks!

I don’t really understand the question - why is there a decimal point if you’re turning a thousand into a billion?

I'm not sure! What should it be?

I'm guessing you have a column with unit billion. You want to put in 85,000. Is that correct?
then you do 85,000 / 1 billion

Which is 0.000085057.
But would you really write this in a table? Are all the other numbers over one billion? You could write < 0.0001
It sounds like the units and data don't match.

If it is already in thousands then you need to divide by 1 million or 10^6 to get it into billions.

So……

£250,000 is
£250 thousand
£0.25m
£0.00025bn

Multiple it by a million.
Sometimes it helps to put gaps inbetween the thousands - makes it easier to see and maybe to understand. But you don’t type the gaps in excel. Let’s pretend we’re counting ants.
Let’s say there are 1,000 ants in a little anthill. 1,000 little anthills will contain 1 000 000 (1 million) ants. And let’s say those million ants in their thousand anthills all fit on one hectare of grassland. That means in 1,000 hectares of grassland you’d find 1 00 000 (one million) anthills containing 1 000 000 000 (one billion) ants.

Ah I see. You don’t actually want a billion, you want to know what proportion of a billion 85,057 is?

Erm, I'm finding it hard to formulate my question. I have a graph in excel where the numbers are supposed to be in billions but they're in thousands - how do I change the figures to billions in excel? It's OK if it's long, I just want to make sure it's correct

So 85 057 is in units of ones. So divide it by a billion to get the proportion of one billion. You can imagine doing this by moving the decimal point 9 places to the left.
85 057.0 starting point
0.85057 - moved it 5 places - need 4 more
=0.000 085 057

Divide by 1 000 000 to convert your thousands to billions

https://www.unitsconverters.com/en/Thousand-To-Billion/Unittounit-3700-3704

But 85 057 isn’t in thousands. It’s in ones?

Hang on is your 85 057 actually 85 million and 57 thousand?

If so you should divide it by one million to change the unit from thousands to billions.
Let’s go back to ants.
85 057 anthills (units of one thousand ants) is the same as 0,085 057 megaplots of grassland (where 1 mega plot (1000hectares in area) of grassland contains 1billion ants).

Is it 85057 or 85057 thousand?

Let’s say all you numbers in units of 1000 are in column C. Make a new column D for units of 1billion. In the first row of your table (probably row 2?) write the formula =C2(whatever the row number is)/1000000. Then drag the formula over the whole column D and it should do each row divided by one million going down the whole column.

Enter the number as 85057e-9 and excel will convert to billions for you.

Saves needing to get the decimal point in the right place and count all the zeros.

So your graph.... Are you saying that the scale in the left side (y axis) is in billions? And if your values are in thousands, the presumably your bars with a value in thousands are so small you can barely see them?