An interesting question came up during one of my consultancy visits last week. They needed to find the top 5 values in a list based on multiple criteria. They then also needed the name of the company achieving that value.

The TRUNC function in Excel is used to reduce the number of decimal places on a number without rounding.

Excel provides a few different rounding functions such as ROUND, ROUNDDOWN and CEILING to cater for all your rounding needs. However the beauty of the TRUNC function is that you can set the number of decimal points for a number without rounding.

Truncating numbers in this way will affect the number and therefore impact on calculations that rely on this number. Using the Excel formatting tools to reduce the number of decimal places is another alternative that does not affect the number involved.

If you import dates into Excel from another system, or from the web, they may appear in Excel using a text format. This looks great but will not provide full functionality. Unless you can convert the text into a date format you will not be able to use that data in formulas, PivotTables and other Excel features.

Fortunately, Excel provides a function that can convert text into a date format, and it is very easy to use.

If working with dates in Excel you may need to find out how many months are between two dates. Fortunately, Excel provides some excellent Date and Time functions that allow us to calculate such differences.