How to get excel to display a certain number of significant figures?

Question

I am using excel and i want to display a value to a certain number of significant figures.

I tried using the following equation

=ROUND(value,sigfigs-         


        

Answer 1

This is an old question, but I've modified sancho.s' VBA code so that it's a function that takes two arguments: 1) the number you want to display with appropriate sig figs (val), and 2) the number of sig figs (sigd). You can save this as an add-in function in excel for use as a normal function:

Public Function sigFig(val As Range, sigd As Range)
    Dim nint As Integer
    Dim nfrac As Integer
    Dim raisedPower As Double
    Dim roundVal As Double
    Dim fmtstr As String
    Dim fmtstrfrac As String

    nint = Int(Log(val) / Log(10)) + 1
    nfrac = sigd - nint

    raisedPower = 10 ^ (nint)
    roundVal = Round(val / raisedPower, sigd) * raisedPower

    If (sigd - nint) > 0 Then
        fmtstrfrac = "." & String(nfrac, "0")
    Else
        fmtstrfrac = ""
    End If

    If nint <= 0 Then
        fmtstr = String(1, "0") & fmtstrfrac
    Else
        fmtstr = String(nint, "0") & fmtstrfrac
    End If

    sigFig = Format(roundVal, fmtstr)
End Function

It seems to work in all the use cases I've tried so far.