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

The formula below works fine. The number of significant figures is set in the first text formula. 0.00 and 4 for 3sf, 0.0 and 3 for 2sf, 0.0000 and 6 for 5sf, etc.

=(LEFT((TEXT(A1,"0.00E+000")),4))*POWER(10,
(RIGHT((TEXT(A1,"0.00E+000")),4)))

The formula is valid for E+/-999, if you have a number beyond this increase the number of the last three zeros, and change the second 4 to the number of zeros +1.

Note that the values displayed are rounded to the significant figures, and should by used for display/output only. If you are doing further calcs, use the original value in A1 to avoid propagating minor errors.