Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, and 2013. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: 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.
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (11230) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, and 2013. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Rounding Numbers.
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2017-04-27 18:05:20
Dennis Costello
Don't forget FLOOR and CEILING - these are interesting and more flexible alternatives to ROUNDUP and ROUNDDOWN. The difference is that the second parameter is "significance" instead of "digits" - instead of returning the number which is a multiple of 10 to the power of "digits" it returns a number which is a multiple of "significance". If we allow only positive numbers, then, ROUNDUP(x, y) is equivalent to CEILING(x, 10^-y). But "significance" could, for instance, be 5 - in which case the value returned could be 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, etc. Or it could be 2.54, in which case you'd get the next (smaller or larger) number of centimeters that corresponds to an exact number of inches.
These functions have two quirks:
- the two parameters "Number" and "Significance" must both have the same sign (both positive or both negative) or you get a #NUM! error
- there is no function corresponding to ROUND - you're always either moving away from 0 (CEILING) or toward it (FLOOR).
2015-10-11 16:20:46
Nick Rea
If you want to round data just for presentation purposes and especially if you use these data items in subsequent calculations, it may be better to use a custom number format to achieve what you want. Otherwise you may accumulate rounding differences that make reconciliation difficult.
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Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, and 2013. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: 
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