Numbers That Mean Something

Numbers in a spreadsheet usually mean something: a quantity, a price, a score. Two habits keep those meanings usable.

Habit one: decimals for money. A price of three and a half is typed 3.5, digits and a decimal point. Excel treats 3.5 and 3.50 as the exact same number, so don't worry about trailing zeros.

Habit two: keep units out of the number. Type 3.5, not $3.50 or 3.5 dollars, the moment extra characters sneak in, the cell can turn into text, and text can't be summed or averaged. So where does the unit go? Into the label: a header like Price ($) tells every reader what the numbers below it mean, while the numbers themselves stay pure and calculable.

     A         B
1    Item      Price ($)
2    Milk      3.5
3    Bread     2.25

This is how real price lists, budgets and invoices are built: meanings in the labels, plain numbers in the cells. In the challenge you'll finish a tiny shopping price list exactly this way.