A Faster Way To Round A Number

Q. When I round financial data to the nearest half-dollar, I use the ROUND function, and while it works fine, a colleague told me the MROUND function is even better. But I can’t find it in Excel. Can you help?

A. My bet is that you haven’t loaded Analysis ToolPak , a collection of powerful functions that comes bundled with Excel but for some reason isn’t automatically loaded when you set up Excel. To load it click on Tools , Templates and Add-Ins . Then place a check next to Analysis ToolPak and you’re in business (see screenshot below).

If you don’t find it under Add-Ins , you have to reload Excel from your original Microsoft Office disk.

When using the ROUND function, you can round to the nearest half-dollar with either of these formulas:

=ROUND(A1/0.5,0)*0.5 or =ROUND(A1*2,0)/2.

The MROUND function uses a shorter formula:

=MROUND(A1,0.5).