If you work with numbers in Google Sheets, you may have noticed that sometimes your numbers get rounded off. This can be frustrating, especially if you need to see all the digits. In this post, we’ll discuss why Google Sheets rounds off numbers and how to stop it from happening.
Reasons for rounding
There are two main reasons why your numbers might be getting rounded in Google Sheets. One reason is that your cells are formatted to display fewer digits. For example, if your cell is formatted in the number format, it will always round off to two decimal places. Another reason is that your number has more than 11 digits, including the decimal point. Google Sheets only permits 11 digits in total to be displayed in a cell, including the decimal point. Any digits after that are rounded off.
Increasing decimal places
If you want to see the entire actual number displayed in the cell, there are two ways to go about it. One way is to simply use the “increase decimal places” button. Each time you press this button, you can see one more decimal place. If you continue to press the button, the cell will show a zero after the last digit.
Limitations of decimal numbers
It’s worth noting that Google Sheets does not allow decimal numbers to have more than 16 digits in total, including the decimal point itself. Any digits after the 16th digit are ignored. This is a limitation of Google Sheets that cannot be changed.
Using the trunk function
The second way to stop Google Sheets from rounding is by using the trunk function. The trunk function removes the last n digits from a decimal number. It takes two parameters: the number or cell reference containing the number you want to truncate, and the number of decimal places that you want to keep.
For example, if you have a number with many decimal places and you want to keep only five decimal places, you can use the trunk function. The last digit will not be rounded off but will be displayed as is. If you had formatted the number to display five decimal places instead, the last digit would have been rounded.
Increasing decimal places with the trunk function
If you want to display more than 11 digits without rounding, you can use the trunk function. However, you will need to press the “increase decimal places” button as many times as you need to in order to display all the digits.
Conclusion
We’ve seen two different techniques in this post. If you want to display more than 11 digits, press the “increase decimal places” button. If you want to display a given number of digits without rounding, use the trunk function. If you want the trunk function to display more than 11 digits, simply press the “increase decimal places” button as many times as you need to. With these techniques, you can avoid rounding in Google Sheets and see all the digits you need.