title: How to get excel to display a certain number of significant figures?
body: <p>I am using excel and i want to display a value to a certain number of significant figures.</p>
  
  <p>I tried using the following equation</p>
  
  <pre><code>=ROUND(value,sigfigs-1-INT(LOG10(ABS(value))))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>with value replaced by the number I am using and sigfigs replaced with the number of significant figures I want.</p>
  
  <p>This formula works sometimes, but other times it doesn't.</p>
  
  <p>For instance, the value 18.036, will change to 18, which has 2 significant figures.  The way around this is to change the source formatting to retain 1 decimal place. But that can introduce an extra significant figure.  For instance, if the result was 182 and then the decimal place made it change to 182.0, now I would have 4 sig figs instead of 3.</p>
  
  <p>How do I get excel to set the number of sig figs for me so I don't have to figure it out manually?</p>