How to add dashes in Excel

You can watch a video tutorial here.

The dash serves multiple purposes in Excel. It can be used as a hyphen between words e.g. short-term, as a separator for phone numbers or identification numbers, or as the minus operator when subtracting numbers or to indicate that a number is negative. If you need to add dashes to Excel, the way of doing so depends on your objective. Here we will look at two ways of adding dashes. One is to format 10-digit phone numbers to have dashes between the 3^rd and 4^th and 6^th and 7^th digits e.g. 555-523-6957, and the second is to display dashes instead of zeroes in a column of numbers.

Option 1 – Format phone numbers

Step 1 – Select the column 

• Select the column of numbers to be formatted in either of the following ways:
  • Click on the first cell of the column, hold down the left-click button on the mouse, and drag to the end of the column
  • Select the first cell of the column, hold down the Shift key and press the down arrow key till the last cell of the column is selected

Step 2 – Open the Format Cells window

• Right-click and select Format Cells  from the context menu

OR

Go to Home > Number  and click on the arrow to expand the menu

OR

Go to Home > Cells > Format > Format Cells

Step 3 – Define the format

• In the Format Cells window go to Number > Custom
• Under Type enter: 000-000-0000
• Check that the sample is correct
• Click OK

Step 4 – Check the result

• The numbers will be formatted to contain dashes

Option 2 – Replace zeroes with dashes

Step 1 – Select the column 

• Select the column of numbers to be formatted in either of the following ways:
  • Click on the first cell of the column, hold down the left-click button on the mouse, and drag to the end of the column
  • Select the first cell of the column, hold down the Shift key and press the down arrow key till the last cell of the column is selected

Step 2 – Use the Comma Style button

• Go to Home > Number
• Click on the Comma Style button

Step 3 – Check the result

• The Comma Style button does 3 things:
  • Inserts the thousands comma separator
  • Formats the number with 2 decimal places
  • Replaces zeroes with dashes