Forcing Excel to show my numbers in scientific notation to a constant power?

**adbyerly** · 03-08-2013, 11:13 AM

Alright, I need to have all of my number be "x10^-6", but Excel wants to make them, for instance, 7.66x10^-3, when I need it to read "7660x10^-6". How can I force excel to do this?
Thanks!

**SharpStatistics** · 03-08-2013, 11:51 AM

Depending on the variation in the size of of the numbers a custom format along the lines of,

#####0.00E+0

should do the trick.

Regards

George
www.sharpstatistics.co.uk

**MrShorty** · 03-08-2013, 12:12 PM

What sharpstatistics is using is called engineering notation. You control the power of the exponent by the number of digit placeholders to the left of the decimal point in the number format code. This article by Jon Peltier explains it in more detail http://peltiertech.com/Excel/NumberFormats.html

One thing to note, I have not found a good way to force an exponent to a certain value (always -6 for example). #####0.0E-0 will use exponents to multiples of 6, but not always -6. As an example, the value 0.5E-6 with the above number format would display as 500000E-12 rather than 0.5E-6. The number 5 will display as 5.0E0 rather than 5000000E-6.