Re: Add "Significant Figures" to Number tab in "Format Cells" of Excel

Tech-Archive recommends: Fix windows errors by optimizing your registry

From: Jerry W. Lewis (post_a_reply_at_no_e-mail.com)
Date: 10/14/04 

Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 11:54:33 GMT

I am not aware of any way to automatically adjust formatting based on
significant figures (though I would be glad to learn of one). However
several years ago I provided a calculation to round to a specified
number of significant figures rather than a specified number of decimal
places

   http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=36079BDF.176C2A08%40erols.com

For suggestions try emailing mswish@microsoft.com

Jerry

Me wrote:

> Using Excel for science classes (the only classes I ever use Excel for) is a
> pain because there isn't an easy way to deal with significant figures.
> Sometimes setting the number of decimal places helps. Plus, it would be nice
> if excel offered a method for dealing with the number "53,000,000" in which
> it had 5 sig. figs. Scientific notation would be useful in this circumstance,
> but usually I have to deal with, for example, "10" such that it has 2
> significant figures. It really is a pain going through all the data fixing
> it to deal with such simple matters.

Quantcast