Are you working with numbers in Excel 2007 that include decimal points?
Did you know you can quickly increase or decrease the precision… or the number of digits to the right of the decimal point.
For example:
- Reduce the number of decimal point places in 56.923 to 56.9
- Increase the number of decimal point places in 23.4 to 23.4256
To change the number of decimal places your numbers have simply:
1) Select the cells you want to work with
2) On the Home tab of the Ribbon in Excel 2007, look for the “Number” group
3) Click on either “Increase Decimal”, or “Decrease Decimal”. They are the buttons which have all the zero’s on them with the left and right arrows.
Simple as that!
‘till next time!
TNP
Um, I thought there was going to be one a day throughout October. What happened to the 3rd through to today?
Ahhh yep… that happens when you schedule your posts to be published in October 2010! Hands up who is an idiot – that would be me.
Might take the time to fix them up a bit now
I wonder if there’s a way to define keyboard shortcuts to these two buttons. Worked for me in Excel 2003 and I#m missing the feature in 2007. Any ideas?
I have a massive spreadsheet that I got from someone else that is doing something that a brand new spreadsheet does not do. If I change the number of decimal points to a lower number, I lose significant digits (i.e. Excel rounds the number to the number of decimal points displayed, losing the rest of the digits in the original number). How do I stop this from happening? I want to keep all the significant digits. Help!
This is not a solution. it changes what appears in the cell but does not change the number. e.g. 7.079 will appear as 7.08 but the number is still 7.079 so if you ar using that cell for calculations 7.079 will be used…not 7.08.