TRUNC Function: How to remove decimals and shorten numeric values

There are different ways in Excel to remove decimals and shorten numeric values. In this article, Quantrimang.com will explain how to use the TRUNC function and point out what makes it different from other techniques.

What is the TRUNC function?

The TRUNC function is a Mathematical and Trigonometric function in Excel, which helps to remove the fractional part of a number, or in other words, round the decimal number to an integer. It was first introduced in MS Excel 2007.

How to use the TRUNC function

Let's look at some TRUNC function examples with some sample data. The example below uses the following TRUNC function.

=TRUNC(A2)

If you do not specify how many digits to truncate, all decimal places will be discarded.

You can see with the value in cell A2 that the TRUNC function does not apply any rounding. It simply truncates to 411.

Let's look at another example. This time the example will reduce the values ​​to two decimal places.

=TRUNC(A2,2)

The TRUNC function will not display extra decimals if you ask it to display more than you have.

Take the following example and truncate it to 2 decimal places.

=TRUNC(A2,2)

The value in cell A4 is reduced to 2 decimal places, but the values ​​in A2 and A3 remain the same because they have less than two decimal places.

If you want to display two decimals, the cells will need to be formatted to force them to display.

Remove time of day and timestamp

A useful example of TRUNC is removing the time portion from dates and timestamps in Excel.

Imagine you have the following date and timestamp, but you only want the date part in the column for analysis.

The following formula will remove the time part.

=TRUNC(A2)

Even though the time portion has been removed, the resulting cells will still need to be formatted as dates.

Use TRUNC to shorten numbers

This is a rare technique. When you use a negative number, the function will truncate the numbers to the left of the decimal point. However, it does not change the number of digits, but replaces them with zeros.

Look at the following example.

=TRUNC(A2,-1)

You can see in each example that a 0 is used to replace the number removed to the left of the decimal point.

There are many ways to remove decimal places, however, most of these will round the number in Excel . The beauty of the TRUNC function is that it does not round the values ​​and simply shortens them to the specified number of decimal places.

Refer to more articles about good Excel functions here .