Rounding Numbers

Excel provides a number of built-in worksheet functions for rounding numbers. The exact function you should use depends on exactly what you need to do with a value.

The first worksheet function is ROUND. This function allows you to essentially round to any power of ten. The syntax is as follows:

=ROUND(num, digits)

The num argument is the number you want to round, while digits indicates how many digits you want the result rounded to. If digits is a positive value, then it represents the number of decimal places to use when rounding. Thus, if digits is 3, then num is rounded to three decimal places. If digits is zero, then ROUND returns a rounded whole number. If digits is a negative number, then ROUND returns a number rounded to the number of tens represented by digits. Thus, if digits is –2, then ROUND returns a number rounded to the nearest 100.

Two other worksheet functions that return rounded values are ROUNDUP and ROUNDDOWN. These functions use the same arguments as ROUND and behave virtually identically. The only difference is that ROUNDUP always rounds num up, meaning away from 0. ROUNDDOWN is the opposite, always rounding down, toward 0.