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JE McGimpsey JE McGimpsey is offline
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Default How to show repeating decimals line

XL can't know that the value 1/3 has infinitely repeating decimals.
Especially since XL stores values in binary representation rather than
decimal.

*All* fractional values terminate when using IEEE double-precision
floating point math, since the values are stored in a finite number of
bits. So there's no way to determine whether a value that appears to
repeat indefinitely does repeat, or whether it's a terminating fraction
that is marginally larger or smaller.

I don't think there's any way of formatting a line over a digit. One
might be able to use a font with that character, and produce it as Text.


In article ,
Brian17 wrote:

Hi all, is there a way to show the line over the repeating decimal?

For example, if I change a cell to a decimal format, type in 1/3 and press
enter I get 0.333333333etc. If I were handwriting it I could represent the
decimal as 0.3 with a line over the 3. Is there a way to do that in Excel for
repeating decimals? There are other fractions that when converted are
repeating decimals as well.

Thanks!
-Brian