displaying numbers in engineering notation

[Guest]

Hi,

I am wondering if there is a way to display numbers in engineering notation?
ie. 3M if the number is 3e+6
or 5u if the number is 5e-6

Best regards,
Joshua.

 

[Myrna Larson]

Scientific notation is probably the closest you'll get.

On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 12:29:02 -0800, "Joshua Wong" <Joshua

 

[David McRitchie]

Hi Joshua,
Exactly what you asked for:
Use ##0.0E+0

More on cell formatting see first large table in
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/formula.htm#cellformat

 

[Guest]

Hi David,

Thank you for the pointer, it was very helpful. The format string
displays numbers in engineering notation in that the exponent part is always
in the power of 3. But I was hoping that there is a way to replace the
exponent part with suffixes such as p, n, u, m, k, M, G, T ...etc

So is it trivial to do this without writing VB code as shown on your
webpage? I hope I am not missing something obvious because most of the
software that I use (such as Cadence or ADS) give you an option to format
numbers in engineering notation.

In any event, I am contend to live with the solution that you've provided.
It would be nice if Microsoft could include an option to format numbers in
engineering notation in future releases.

Joshua.

 

[David McRitchie]

Hi Joshua,
This will get you the characters you ask for but if involves a helper column,
and the result is text, which maybe is what you need for your other program.

=SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(A16,"##0.0E+0"),"E","p")

or if you want E- but not E+ use
=SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(A16,"##0.0E-0"),"E","p")

Why the other letters?

 

[Guest]

Hi David,

Sorry, I wasn't being specific. When I was referring to the exponent, I
meant
the letter 'E' and the number. For example: E+9 or E-6

In engineering notation, the exponent is denoted by a letter and has the
following mapping:

123E-15 -> 123 f
123E-12 -> 123 p
123E-9 -> 123 n
123E-6 -> 123 u
123E-3 -> 123 m
123E0 -> 123
123E3 -> 123 k
123E6 -> 123 M
123E9 -> 123 G
123E12 -> 123 T
and so on...

I need to analyse data that spans across large orders of magnitude, as a
result it is much more intuitive for me to read numbers in engineering
notation.

Regards,
Joshua.

 

[David McRitchie]

Hi Joshua,
Thanks for the explanation.

Looks like something possibly for electrical engineering, but is it really
called engineering notation by anyone.

You can't do that by formatting, you would have to use programming,
and assuming that the values would change that would have to be
a User Defined Function (UDF). If I were writing it, I would have
the UDF work from the text value returned from the VBA format
statement (the equivalent of the TEXT Worksheet Function).

Fortunately, I think, you already indicated that what was supplied
would be preferable to programming.