Error adding up 5 numbers! (or is it me?!)

Question

Hi -
I've set Numbers to add up a column of 5 numbers and put the total in a different cell. But it's adding up the numbers wrongly. Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?
I've put a screenshot on my Public iDisk:
https://public.me.com/glovepuppet/
(It's the .jpg called NumbersMOZ001)
The formula is shown as SUM(H2:H8) which makes 556.02, so why has it put the total as 556.00?
(I know it's only 2p, but it's irritating!)
Help please!
Andy

Answer 1

This behavior was described many many times.
The values which you sum are the result of calculations.
I guess that you use =my_formula
which may return values with more than two decimal digits.
When you ask a cell to display two decimal digits, it displays the rounded value *_but, happily, it doesn't change the stored value_*
So you aren't summing what you see but what is stored.
Here is your error.
To sum what you see, you must design formulas whose result is what you see.
=ROUND(my_formula,2) is what you need.
So, to be short,
Numbers did perfectly what you urged it to do.
Next time, before writing formulas remember that *_computers are just efficient idiots_*.
Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) vendredi 26 novembre 2010 17:26:43