The ROUNDDOWN function in Google Sheets rounds a number down to a specified number of decimal places. The function does not use standard rounding rules. Instead, it rounds all numbers down.
⚠️ The ROUNDDOWN function changes a number’s value, while number formatting changes its display. If you change the look of a number with formatting, the full value of the number is still there; but you don’t see it. The unrounded value is permanently gone if you remove places with this function.
Contents
Syntax
=ROUNDDOWN(value, [places])
value– The number that you want to round.places– Optional. The number of decimal places that you want to round to. If you don’t specify a place value, the default is0.
Similar Functions
Several functions deal with rounding. Choose the most appropriate for your use.
- CEILING – Rounds a number up to the nearest integer multiple of specified significance
- INT – Rounds a number down to the nearest integer
- FLOOR – Rounds a number down to the nearest integer multiple of specified significance
- MROUND – Rounds one number to the nearest integer multiple of another
- ROUND – Round a number to a specified number of decimal places using standard rounding
- ROUNDDOWN – Round a number down to a specified number of places
- ROUNDUP – Round a number up to a specified number of places
- TRUNC: Truncates a number to a certain number of significant digits by omitting less significant digits
Insert Math Symbols (Add-On)
Examples
The syntax for this function is relatively simple. However, we must look at several examples to understand how it works.
Example 1 – Round Down to Two Decimal Places
Let’s start with a single, straight-forward example of rounding the number 123.4567 to two decimal places:
=ROUNDDOWN(123.4567, 2)
This function will return the value of 123.45.
Example 2 – Round Down to Nearest Integer
You can also use the ROUNDDOWN function to round numbers down to the nearest integer. To do this, set the value for places to 0. For example, the following formula will round the number 123.4567 down to the nearest integer:
=ROUNDDOWN(345.678, 0)
This example will return the value 345.
Example 3 – Round Down to Different Place Values
Now that we’ve seen a few examples to understand the basics let’s try different values for the places argument using 345.678 every time. We’ll see different levels of rounding as a result.
Column C has no formatting applied, so only the ROUNDDOWN function drives the results.
Rows 2 and 3 have the same result even though the places arguments (3 and 2) are different. This difference is because Google Sheets only shows decimal places to the last significant digit unless you apply formatting to force Google Sheets to show insignificant digits. Therefore, the 456.78 in row 2 is only shown as 456.78 since the ending 0 does not impact the number’s value.
Google Sheets rounds the results in rows 4 and 5 to 1 and 0 decimal places, respectively. The 456.7 and the 456 are the new values, with the decimal values discarded. If you change the formatting of column C to show more decimal values, they will be zeroes.
The negative values for places in rows 6 through 8 are removing significant digits. These results show that the ROUNDDOWN function can remove more than decimals if you use a negative number for the places argument. In the last row, the value is completely removed as all of the significant digits are rounded away. Be careful when using a negative number for the places argument as the results differ by orders of magnitude.
Example 4 – Round a Negative Number
This function also rounds negative numbers. Let’s take the previous example and change the sign to negative.
=ROUNDDOWN(-123.4567, 0)
This formula returns the value -123, which is a different result than the INT function provides. Read more about the difference between INT and ROUND in Google Sheets.
Live Examples in Google Sheets
Make a copy of the spreadsheet with these examples.