Quote:
Originally Posted by riothecat
JOEu2004, I understand what you are saying, but cannot fix it. All my decimals are down to 2 places. I do however have a convoluted formula and it is to low by 50 plus cents on some og the answers.
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If by "down to 2 places", you mean that you are
formatting to display 2 decimal places, that is not sufficient.
Formatting alone only affects how a value
appears. It does not affect the
actual cell value.
Moreover, as my example with 10.01 - 10 demonstrates, constants might have only 2 decimal places, but
calculations with those constants might result in values with more decimal places because of the binary arithmetic anomalies that I alluded to before.
Finally, if results are significantly off (by 50+ cents, for example), the mistake could be in your calculations. Not really a mistake per se; but again, failing to round calculations based on your expectations.
For example, =12.45*10% in A1 is 1.245. That might display 1.25 if you format to 2 decimal places. So you might expect a subsequent calculation like =A1*10 to be 12.50, but in fact it is 12.45. And if you sum a bunch of calculations like my example in A1, the cumulative effect can be a significant "error" -- that is, a deviation from your expectations based on
displayed values (appearances).
For all of these examples, the remedy is the same:
explicitly round to the precision that you expect calculations to be accurate to. That means: use the ROUND function.
Did you even try it?
Quote:
Originally Posted by riothecat
I wish I could post this here.. but it wont let me attach. It's only like 19 kb in size.
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As I said, upload an example Excel file (redacted) that demonstrates the problem to a file-sharing website, and post the public/share URL here.
One such website is box.net/files. After uploading the file, be sure to click on Share to get the public URL.