Thursday, November 3, 2011

It's an Excel-lent Round Up

When working in the civil engineering world, you sometimes need to round a number up. For example, if you're looking to size circular rcp storm sewer, then you will need to be able to round to the nearest half foot. When working in Excel, the formula =ROUND(Number, Num_digits) will not give you the desired result.

So instead you should use the Excel CEILING function =CEILING(Number, Significance).  The Ceiling function allows you dictate your rounding to the nearest multiple of significance. 

In the case of a value of 3.298 feet that needs to be rounded up to the nearest 0.5 feet, we would use the formula =CEILING(3.298,0.5) to return a value of 3.5. Likewise a value of 2.033 would return a value of 2.5.

This great tip was provided by Steve Zobal, a coworker of mine at MWM DesignGroup.

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