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How to calculate a cumulative (running) percentage

✓ Verified in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 ✓ Verified in Google Sheets (2026-08-30)

Show what share of the total has accumulated by each row — Pareto charts, progress, top-N contribution.

The formula

AppFormulaNotes
Excel (desktop)=SUM($A$2:A2)/SUM($A$2:$A$100)Sort descending first for a Pareto. Fill down; format as %. The expanding range is the running total.
Google Sheets=SUM($A$2:A2)/SUM($A$2:$A$100)Identical.
LibreOffice Calc=SUM($A$2:A2)/SUM($A$2:$A$100)Identical.

How it works

Two pieces: a running total (the half-anchored range $A$2:A2 grows as you fill down, summing everything from the top to the current row) divided by the grand total (the fully-anchored $A$2:$A$100). By the second row the running sum is 50+30 = 80 out of a 100 total, so 80% has accumulated. Format the column as a percentage. This is the backbone of a Pareto analysis — sort the values largest-first, and the cumulative % shows how few items make up 80% of the whole. The final row always reaches 100%.

Verified, not just documented

We ran =SUM($A$2:A3)/SUM($A$2:$A$4) in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 (headless, with forced recalculation) and it returned 0.8 — exactly the expected result. We then ran the same formulas in Google Sheets, executed 2026-08-30: a formula-only workbook goes into Google Drive, which converts it to a Sheet and recalculates every formula with Google’s own engine, and comes back out as .xlsx carrying the values Google computed. It returned 0.8 for the worked example, the same value LibreOffice produced. Both engines’ numbers on this page are executed results. The Excel formula follows Microsoft’s official documented syntax — we do not run desktop Excel.

Functions used

SUM — see full Excel, Google Sheets & LibreOffice compatibility for each.

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