Excel offers a number of ways to round numbers. Use the various versions to:
make sure there are not decimals out of view that could affect your calculations
ensure that your numbers are shown add up and don't confuse your reader
round up numbers so you don't imply more precision than necessary
give the bigger picture view of numbers in thousands or millions
Follow along the Round exercise worksheet and you can see how different numbers will come up based on different calculations. In this worksheet, as you can see, the calculations come up with partial units.
Let's assume that is not correct, so we will use Round to fix it.
The formula is =ROUND(+B3*D3*E3*F3,0). It has two parts- the calculation, or what you want rounded, and how many decimal places. Since we want it to be whole units, we select zero). However, what if you want to round to the nearest hundreds. Then you would input -2, since you are going to two places left of the decimal point.
One thing to note about Round is that it will round up or down, depending upon which number rounding to is closer. You could however, always round up or round down.
Notice how the totals change slightly by rounding up. The formula is the same, you just use Roundup instead of Round.
Rounddown works the same way.
But suppose you want to round to some other number, rather than a decimal place up or down.
Mround let's you specify the number you want to round to. In this case, we are rounding to the nearest multiple of 5.
Note- if you do not have Mround installed (part of the analysis pack add-in, you will get an error). To load up the add-in (you may need your Excel CD) go to Add-ins under the Tools menu (this is the view under Excel XP:
But you say, you want to either round up or down to a specific number. No problem, Excel has tools for you.
Ceiling works similar to Mround, but will round up.
Floor will round down.
One of these tools should work for you. Use them to simplify your calculations and make sure what is seen foots.