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Excel seeing numbers not displayed in a cell

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    Excel seeing numbers not displayed in a cell

    I'm trying to use a formula to calculate how much the figure in cell D4 would be once increased by the percentage in N4 (so that if the answer was typed into D4, N4 would be 0%).

    The correct answer - which you get if the sum in D6 is typed into a calculator - is displayed in D6 [£1,085.27] but as you can see I've had to type -1.82% into F6 (the cell which the formula in D6 refers to) to get that answer.

    I want to be able do the same calculation using a formula to capture the -1.82% figure from cell N4, since this figure will change. But when I use the formula in cell D8, it comes up with the wrong answer [£1085.31]. It seems as though Excel is seeing numbers in N4 that aren't there which is why it's coming up with the wrong answer. Can anyone explain this?
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    Re: Excel seeing numbers not displayed in a cell

    If you look at the value in cell N4 you will find it is actually: -1.8230000%

    You're only displaying two decimal places so you don't see the actual number. Try rounding it.

    Regards, TMS
    Trevor Shuttleworth - Retired Excel/VBA Consultant

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    Re: Excel seeing numbers not displayed in a cell

    Thanks TMS, I had assumed that when you set a cell to display a certain number of decimal points it automatically rounded the number for you, obviously not..
    Is there any way to change the settings of the spreadsheet so that it does round to a certain number of decimal places for all cells?

    Either way you've solved my problem, thanks for that.

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    Re: Excel seeing numbers not displayed in a cell

    No, it uses what it gets from the calculation.

    You can use Excel Options | Advanced | When calculating this workbook | Set precision as displayed ... but that, potentially, is a very bad thing to do as it affects all numbers, even those typed and you *permanently" lose the precision.

    Better to just use ROUND ... =ROUND(M4/4000,4) formatted with two decimal places.


    Regards, TMS


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    Re: Excel seeing numbers not displayed in a cell

    Great, thanks.

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