significant figures

[lisamh81a]

So I should be doing real work, but I have become obsessed with this problem...
On previous message boards, people were saying that you can round to a particular number of significant figures using this: (quote from Jay Petrulis)
With your raw data in A1 and the number of significant figures you desire in B1, try:

=ROUND(A1,B1-1-INT(LOG10(ABS(A1))))

However, this doesn't actually show the last significant digits if they are zeros past the decimal point. I know you could do this by formatting the cells if they all round to the same decimal places, but what if you have numbers like 1299, 12.99, and 0.1299? If you round to 3 sig figs, you get 1300, 13, and 0.13, where I would like to instead show 1300, 13.0 and 0.130.
Also, I don't want the values to actually change (be rounded) if they are to be used in subsequent calculations, I just want them to show up with the correct sig figs.
Thanks,
Lisa

 

[Dave Hawley]

Hi Lisa

You could use a Custom Format of: [<1]0.000;0.0;0.0

But it will noy accomodate the rounding of whole numbers, eg 1299 to 1300