ROUND Function in Excel

No. Excel's worksheet ROUND function uses round-half-away-from-zero. ROUND(2.5, 0) = 3, ROUND(-2.5, 0) = -3. Not the "round to nearest even" behavior of banker's rounding.

The confusion comes from VBA. Application.Round() in VBA does use banker's rounding — that's a separate function. Worksheet ROUND has never behaved that way, and never will (changing it would break decades of spreadsheets).

Two options. Pattern 1: =ROUND(A2/5, 0) * 5 — divide by the multiple, round to 0 places, multiply back. Works for any denomination. Pattern 2: =MROUND(A2, 5) — dedicated function, one call, cleaner.

MROUND has a quirk: sign of number and multiple must match, or it returns #NUM!. The ROUND-divide-multiply pattern always works.

Because you formatted cells to show 2 decimals instead of ROUNDing the actual values. Formatting only changes what you see; the raw stored value still has 4+ decimal places. SUM adds the raw values, not the displayed ones.

Fix: replace formatting-only cells with actual ROUND formulas at the source. Or, for a single-formula solution: =SUMPRODUCT(ROUND(A2:A100, 2)) rounds each value before summing. This is the correct pattern for any invoice, payroll, or tax total.

Rounds to the LEFT of the decimal point. -1 rounds to nearest 10, -2 to nearest 100, -3 to nearest 1,000, and so on.

Example: =ROUND(12345.67, -2) returns 12300. Great for executive summaries, budget planning, or any "round numbers only" report.

ROUND rounds to a decimal place (positive: right of decimal, negative: left of decimal). MROUND rounds to any multiple — like 5, 25, 0.05, or even a time like "0:15".

They overlap for rounding to powers of 10: =ROUND(A2, -1) and =MROUND(A2, 10) give the same result. For anything else (rounding to $5, 15-minute intervals, etc.), MROUND is more direct.

ROUND changes the actual numeric value. TEXT formats a number as a string for display without changing the underlying value.

Use ROUND when you're going to do math with the result. Use TEXT when you're building a display string (e.g. for a report title or concatenated label). =TEXT(A2, "$#,##0.00") returns the text "$1,234.57" — you can't SUM that.

Yes, and it's often the right approach. =ROUND(A2*B2*1.0825, 2) multiplies then rounds in one step. This is preferable to two-step approaches because it avoids storing intermediate raw values.

For SUMs across many rows, use =SUMPRODUCT(ROUND(range, 2)) — the ROUND happens element-by-element inside the array, then SUMPRODUCT totals the rounded values.

Excel truncates it to an integer before using it. So =ROUND(x, 1.7) behaves identically to =ROUND(x, 1). Excel doesn't error, but the fractional part is ignored.

Best practice: always pass an integer to keep intent explicit. If your num_digits comes from a formula, wrap it in INT() to make the truncation visible.

Yes — Excel stores dates and times as numbers (whole numbers for dates, fractions of a day for times). ROUND treats them as numbers.

=ROUND(NOW(), 0) returns midnight of today (drops the time portion). =ROUND(A2, 4) where A2 is a time rounds to the nearest 0.0001 of a day (~8.6 seconds). For meaningful time rounding, use MROUND with a time literal: =MROUND(A2, "0:15") rounds to nearest 15 minutes.

Floating-point representation. The value 0.135 can't be stored exactly in binary — it's actually stored as ~0.13499999999999998. Since that's less than 0.135 by a hair, ROUND correctly rounds it down to 0.13.

This is a hardware-level quirk affecting every language and tool that uses IEEE 754 floats (Excel, Python, JavaScript, C, everything). Rare in real workflows unless you're generating exact half-boundary test cases. If you truly need it: =ROUND(A2 + 0.0000001, 2).

ROUND for standard commercial rounding — invoices, reports, most everyday math. ROUNDUP when you must never under-count — shipping tiers, box counts, time billing. ROUNDDOWN when you must never over-count — budget items, safe inventory counts, tax deductions.

Rule of thumb: if under-counting would cost you money → ROUNDUP. If over-counting would cost you money → ROUNDDOWN. Everything else → ROUND.

Barely. ROUND is a fast, non-volatile function. Excel can evaluate hundreds of thousands of ROUND calls per second. In workbooks with 1M+ rows, the recalc cost of ROUND is dwarfed by the cost of the actual arithmetic feeding into it.

If a workbook is slow, ROUND is almost never the cause. Look at volatile functions (NOW, TODAY, RAND), massive VLOOKUPs, or array formulas over huge ranges instead.