04 Some Basic Functions, Part 2 (ROUND, TRUNC)
To round off [pun intended] the discussion on basic functions, we’re going to look at two other number functions that might come in handy.
- =ROUND(cell reference or number,# digits to round)
- With round, you are telling Excel to take a number (let’s use 132.5678 as an example), and round to a certain digit.
- For example, if you wanted to round 132.5678 to the nearest whole number, you would put in =ROUND(132.5678,0)
- The rest works much like you’d guess. Rounding to the nearest…
- hundredth (two places to the right of the decimal point) would look like this =ROUND(132.5678,2)
- tens (two places to the left of the decimal point) would like this =ROUND(132.5678,-2)
- =TRUNC(cell reference or number,# digits to truncate)
- Truncating is similar to rounding, but instead of rounding it simply chops off the number where you tell it to
- Taking 132.5678 from the last example, rounding to the nearest whole number would give you 133. TRUNC, on the other hand, would give you 132.
- Just like ROUND, you can TRUNC to the right or the left of the decimal place. If you want to truncate to the hundreds, it would look like this =TRUNC(132.5678,-2) and the result would simply be 100.
If you want to see how this looks in Excel, take a look at our example file here: Basic functions, Part 2 (Excel 2007)
