But what if you want to decrease a number by a certain percentage? Just plug the numbers in using the formula above. Subtracting percentages works in much the same way if we want to subtract, say, 30% from 90%. Since the cell references are relative rather than absolute, the formula adjusts for each row so that the formula in cell D3 refers to the values C3 and B3, the formula in cell D4 refers to the values C4 and B4, and so on. To subtract numbers in two columns row-by-row, write the standard subtraction formula in the output cell of the first row, then drag or double-click the fill handle to copy the formula to the remaining rows. The correct thing to do is to simply add all the numbers within the range, preferably by using the SUM function for the sake of efficiency. To calculate Net Income where the deductions are already saved as negative numbers, placing a minus sign before them would result in a Net Income which is higher than Gross, which is of course, incorrect. If the numbers you want to subtract are already listed as negatives, placing a minus sign before them converts them to positive (two negatives make a positive, right?). The result is, of course, the same as using the longer method. That total is then subtracted from the Gross Income in cell B1. The SUM function adds the values within the B3 to B6 range. Since the values to be deducted above are positive numbers, we’ve placed them in parentheses (so that this portion is calculated first).

The above method can get quite cumbersome if the list of numbers to be subtracted is a long one! We can treat the numbers in the list as a cell range instead, and use the SUM function to our advantage.

Of course, we can use cell references as we learned before. In the example below, we can calculate net income by subtracting all the deductions from the gross income one by one, using the formula number1 - number2 - number3…. You may have a situation where you want to subtract two or more numbers, or numbers in a range.

Enter a subtraction formula in excel