Heads up! To view this whole video, sign in with your Courses account or enroll in your free 7-day trial. Sign In Enroll

Spreadsheet Basics

Preview

Start a free Courses trial
to watch this video

Sign up for Treehouse

The ROUNDDOWN & ROUNDUP Functions

1:52 with Michael Watson

These functions round a calculation up or down. You can use it to avoid fractional values when calculating things like the number of seats in a stadium, or the total number of employees needed to complete a project.

Example Files

  • you can continue to use the spreadsheet from the last video, or
  • open a copy of this spreadsheet to catch up to this video

Reference

Related Discussions

Have questions about this video? Start a discussion with the community and Treehouse staff.

Sign up

    Related Discussions

    Have questions about this video? Start a discussion with the community and Treehouse staff.

    Sign up

    The round up and round down function help you round values in your formulas. 0:00
    This is helpful if you're trying to calculate how many humans you'll need for 0:04
    something, or whether or 0:08
    not you have enough seating capacity in a stadium, for example. 0:09
    Let's walk through an example together. 0:12
    Here, we're talking about student to teacher ratios. 0:15
    So our goal is to have a student to teacher ratio of 30. 0:19
    We have 435 students, so that means that we need 14.5 teachers. 0:23
    Now clearly, you can't have half a person, 0:29
    so we can use round down or round up to help for this. 0:32
    So, I'm gonna hit Enter, then =ROUNDUP to call the function. 0:37
    Then we have teachers needed 14.5 and 0:45
    I wanna round it to zero decimal places. 0:52
    So we round up from 14.5, that gets us 15, so we need 15 teachers. 0:59
    Let's say our budget was tight and 1:07
    we didn't have the funds to afford to have extra capacity. 1:09
    In this situation, we might use the round down function. 1:13
    And just deal with the fact that we're gonna have a student to teacher ratio 1:16
    above what we want for a little bit of time. 1:20
    So the value rounds down to 14. 1:23
    We can also do it, instead of referencing the cell above, 1:26
    we're actually referencing the calculation we're interested in. 1:29
    So I do ROUNDDOWN(C22/C21), 1:33
    and we get the same thing. 1:43

    You need to sign up for Treehouse in order to download course files.

    Sign up

      You need to sign up for Treehouse in order to set up Workspace

      Sign up