Instructor44 wrote:
Hey Bill,
My son-in-law is an aeronautic engineer and "close enough" is never good
enough for him. I agree with you though on practicality and my students get
the points. Each one of them emailed me with this "problem." This assignment
has been bothering me for a few semsters now because I couldn't answer the
question. I want to be able to explain to them--"why." Now I have a few
things they can try. I have a feeling it may be the publisher's template, but
I would have never thought of that without getting on forums and asking the
question. Macros, goal-seeking and pivot tables are up next! Let the fun
begin!

Thank you for your reply, Bill.

We had an analytical engineer who used an HP scientific calculator for
most of his work -- this was long before PC's came into general usage --
and he would write down the answers complete to 8 or 10 decimal places
displayed by the calculator for all his work. At the time I used a slide
rule, which was usually "close enough."

We both later graduated to computer use, but I still often insert the
value of pi as 3.14 or 3.1416. Excel's Pi function returns the number
3.14159265358979, accurate to 15 digits. Wikipedia has a fascinating
article about pi. I note this excerpt: For example, a value (of pi)
truncated to 11 decimal places is accurate enough to calculate the
circumference of a circle the size of the earth with a precision of a
millimeter.

Just to add an item to your original subject, Excel 2007 on my computer
allows me to pick 15.00 as a column width and have the value stick.

Bill