I have a column of data with numbers stored in text.
The numbers look like this: 735999114002665788
If I select any cell in this column and refer to it with the function =value(), the number shows up as 735999114002665000.
As you can see the last three digits are 0. This happens all the time with numbers this long - but NOT with numbers containing less digits.
Am I trying to convert a number that's too large or what's up? Please help! I've tried every form of text-to-number method with identical results :(
Excel's number precision is 15 digits, which is why you're losing the last three digits when converting your 18 character string
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/excel-specifications-and-limits-1672b34d-7043-467e-8e27-269d656771c3#ID0EBABAAA=Excel_2016-2013
Excel only allows a maximum of 15 digits of precision for each number in a cell. The reason why this number:
735999114002665788
becomes this:
735999114002665000
is because Excel is choosing to retain the 15 most significant digits in the number. This means that the ones, tens, and thousands digits are being tossed out.
By the way, this question has been asked before on SuperUser, and you can read about it here:
https://superuser.com/questions/437764/why-is-excel-truncating-my-16-digit-numbers
Related
How does excel determine what to number to display? specifically the number of decimal places
for example:
50.98, when stored as a single-precision float is 50.979999542236328125
50.979999 is also stored as the exact same single-precision float
(binary rep. 01000010010010111110101110000101, taken from here: https://www.h-schmidt.net/FloatConverter/IEEE754.html)
when i type 50.98 & 50.979999 into 2 cells, change format to number, and extend out the decimal places using the formatting button
it represents them exactly as 50.98 & 50.979999, as i originally typed.
how is that working? is excel storing the exact text i typed and not (directly) storing the float data type at all?
if it stores it as a double, how does it preserve the exact precision i originally typed in that case?
i can't find documentation outlining how this works.
Note its not causing me any problems, i just need an explanation for differences in how excel displays vs calculations based on those values.
it represents them exactly as 50.98 & 50.979999, as i originally typed.
Excel is padding with zeros after 15 significant decimal digits.
The internal number is encoded with a high enough binary precision such that limiting output to 15 deimcal places, the original typed in decimal values appear to be exactly that.
=2/3 is an informative example showing this limit and exposing the binary internals by carefully extracting out a bit at a time.
As displayed in one cell, decimal output rounds to 15 places, padding with zero after that.
0.66666666666666700000000
The below does a binary conversion of =2/3 and forms 0.101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101012, exactly what is expected if Excel used a binary64. (Below)
OP's observations are consistent with using binary64 and rounding output as decimal text to 15 significant digits.
Cell A3: =FLOOR(B2*A$1,1), Cell B3 = =B2*A$1 - A3
Hypothesis: When displaying a number, Excel first converts a number to a decimal numeral with at most 15 significant digits even if more are requested. If additional digits are requested, they are filled in as zeros. (In addition, Excel may apply other alterations depending on context.)
In Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac, I entered =1+22*POWER(2,-52) in A1 and =1+23*POWER(2,-52) in A2. Using IEEE-754 binary64, these should generate the numbers 1.000000000000004884981308350688777863979339599609375 and 1.0000000000000051070259132757200859487056732177734375. Entering =A1-1 and =A2-1 in B1 and B2 and setting these to Number format with 30 decimal places shows “0.000000000000004884981308350690” and “0.000000000000005107025913275720”, which is consistent with IEEE-754 binary64. So we have some assurance the numbers above were indeed generated and stored in Excel.
Setting A1 and A2 to Number format with 20 decimal places shows “1.00000000000000000000” and “1.00000000000001000000”.
Clearly, if Excel were displaying the actual numbers with 20 decimal places, it would show “1.000000000000004885” and “1.000000000000005107”. It does not. The display we see is consistent with converting the numbers using 15 decimal digits (significant digits, not just those after the decimal point) and then padding with zeros.
Converting 50.98 to the IEEE-754 binary64 format yields 50.97999999999999687361196265555918216705322265625. Displaying this with 15 decimal digits yields 50.9800000000000.
I have a large excel file the contains many way-points in Latitude and Longitude in the degree and minutes. My problem is that the numbers can't be rounded and must stay exactly the same, but the last 2 numbers need to be removed (in most cases)
I was wondering if there is a formula that would only allow three characters past the decimal. This is how most my numbers look.
26° 17.82964
However Sometimes they look like this
26° 9.82
I know I can format the cell as a number and set the decimal place to 3, however when I copy and paste it doesn't stay the same.
This formula will truncate (It does not Round) the numbers and give all if less:
=MID(A1,1,FIND(".",A1)+3)
This formula will round, but it will always fill out the numbers to three decimal places (I am aware the OP did not want rounding, this is for others that may want it.):
=LEFT(A1,FIND(" ",A1))&TEXT(ROUND(--MID(A1,FIND(" ",A1),LEN(A1)),3),"0.000")
I know how to isolate the decimal using the TRUNC() function, as well as taking the original value and subtracting this truncated part.
And I can then multiply to get whole number.
But that only works if all my decimals are the same place. I want something that will get me the amount after the decimal point as a whole number, regardless of how many places.
eg: 12.2 would return 2
12.21 would return 21
With data in A1, consider:
=IF(ISERROR(FIND(".",A1)),A1,--MID(A1,(FIND(".",A1)+1),9999))
Naturally leading zeros in the output are dropped:
I have an excel with 28 position binary numbers. I need to convert them to decimal numbers, but function bin2dec don't work with numbers longer than 10 bits. Can anyone help me with this?
Use the following formula to mimic a BIN2DEC function that coverts larger than 10 bits.
=SUMPRODUCT(--MID(A2,LEN(A2)+1-ROW(INDIRECT("1:"&LEN(A2))),1),(2^(ROW(INDIRECT("1:"&LEN(A2)))-1)))
Remember that Excel has a numerical precision of 15 digits. If you want 28 digits, format the cell as Text or preface the string of digits with a single tick (e.g. ') as a PrefixCharacter property.
I brute forced it with the math, may be inelegant, but for a 16 bit number where leading 0's will be displayed this works and can easily be adapted to longer strings
This works well if you are working with fixed length words, like verifying values in memory, BIT registers, etc.
16 bit
=BIN2DEC(LEFT(R5,8))*2^8+BIN2DEC(RIGHT(R5,8))
32 bit could be
=BIN2DEC(MID(R10,1,8))*2^24+BIN2DEC(MID(R10,9,8))*2^16+BIN2DEC(MID(R10,17,8))*2^8+BIN2DEC(MID(R10,25,8))
Again, this works if you have a fixed length input, leading zeros are displayed.
I have a column of numbers which varying in length (some of the numbers are 9 characters, while others are 7). I need them to all be 9 characters so I want to add 0s in front of the numbers. For example, if I have the number 0294843 which is 7 characters long, I want to add 2 zeros in the front, so 000284843. Since every number has different lengths (some are 9, 8, 7, 6, etc.) I'd like to find a function that will automatically add zeros dependent on the length. So far I have this:
=IF(LEN(D5)<9, D5, ...)
Where the ... is what I'm not sure what to put in. Thanks!
=TEXT(A1,"000000000")
Where A1 is the cell to pad and the number of 0s is the length you want.
There's no need to use formulas for formatting.
Simply use a custom format. From here:
When you want to display leading zeros for a fixed-length number,
create a custom format with the same number of zeros (0) as digits
that you want to display. For example, if you want to display a
fixed-length number with five digits, create a custom number format
with five zeros.
In your case the custom format would be 000000000