2009/7/9 AG <[email protected]>

> Hello
>
> I am using scientific notation in a spreadsheet, but want to round the data
> off to a common exponent.
>
> At present I have data such as:
>
> 6.8E+15
> 1.15E+21
> 5.09E+19
>
> and so on.
>
> I want to do a graph, but at present the columns are very out of proportion
> because of the data with 21 as an exponent.  I therefore wanted to change
> this to ^19 which about the most frequently occurring exponent in my data
> set.  How do I do this?  At the moment, whenever I try, Cacl very helpfully
> (or not!!) automatically changes 115E+19 back to 1.15E+21 and so on.  I
> obviously cannot change this to text in terms of the formatting otherwise it
> seems as if the chart won't pick it up for display.  So how do I get around
> this?
>
> Thanks
>
> AG


One possible kludge:

   - Assume, for this discussion, that your data are in column A and that
   column B is spare
   - in cell B1 enter the formula =log10(a1)
   - copy B1 down the column to cover all the values in column A. The result
   of this will be that B2 will be set to =log10(a2), B3 will have =log10(a3)
   and so on. In your short example, column B will end up containing (top to
   bottom): 15.83, 21.06 and19.71
   - draw your chart using column B


-- 
Harold Fuchs
London, England
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