Excel: how to show engineering units?

[NleahciM]

Hi - I'd like to have excel formulas spit out things in units that I'm more used to. So instead of using scientific notation - ie 1E3, 25E7, I'd rather see 1K, 250M, etc. Is there any way to force Excel to do this?

Additionally, is there any way to make Excel add on the unit to answer to a problem? So, if the answer is 5millivolts - I'd like Excel to print out "5mV". Additionally, it'd be really sweet if I could use "5mV" as the input to these formulas - but I'm sure Excel will choke on both the m and the V.

Or am I expecting too much of Excel?

 

[pigster]

To display specific units, just set your number format to something like

0.00" mv"

Anything in the quotes gets appended to the number

 

[NleahciM]

To display specific units, just set your number format to something like

0.00" mv"

Anything in the quotes gets appended to the number

Thanks for the suggestion - but that isn't exactly what I'm trying to do. Best I've been able to come up with is getting Excel to print numbers like this: 250.00E-3 A. Cell formatting for that is: ##0.00E+0 \A. This keeps the exponents to multiples of 3. So this is pretty good. But ideally it'd be saying 250.00mA. I just don't know how to get Excel to recognize that E-3 = m.

But for now what I have gotten working is pretty good.

 

[Whatsisname]

"Excel" and "Engineering" together in the same sentence, thats your problem right there.

With that said, if you have two seperate columns, one for the prefix and one for the unit you could get the job done. You'd have to generously use division by three, round, and base 10 log to compute the prefix numeric. Then divide your actual value by the prefix to get a display value. Then use a big ole nested if clause or something to take the numeric prefix and turn that into the si prefixs.