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Ron Rosenfeld
 
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Default Round-down complex numbers

On Thu, 2 Feb 2006 08:35:11 -0600, nsv
wrote:


OK, Pete - complex numbers are, well, complex and I guess they are not
very much used outside the area of calculations with electric power at
50/60 Hz. Other spreadsheets used to be more "complex friendly", but
Excel has given complex numbers a low priority in userfriendlyness and
it is quite a task to write the calculations into the formulas.

Ron - thanks for the tip, but as you can see my formulas reach a bit
further than just using the COMPLEX function.
I seek at format that works for complex numbers just like it does for
real numbers, but I suppose it doesn't exist.


I believe that's a design issue. If I am not mistaken, the complex numbers are
actually stored, in the cell, as a text string. So you would have to actually
round the numbers before displaying.

This is different from values that are stored as numbers, where formatting
changes only the way in which the numbers are "displayed" and do not change the
actual value that is stored.

I suppose you could leave the calculations in a 'hidden' cell, and use a
"rounded" cell for display purposes. That would certainly be more complex.


--ron