formatting

[aarora87]

Dear excel-perts

I have a lot of cells containing positive numbers upto 6 decimal places in brackets. How can I most easily convert them such that they remain in brackets but with precision upto only 3 decimal places? For those cells containing numbers that are not within brackets I can format them easily as they are numeric...

In fact I also have cells in which numbers (may be positive or negative) might be succeeded by asterisk (*). I would like to reduce the precision of these numbers to 3 decimal places as well.

Many thanks and cheers
Abhimanyu

[martindwilson]

are they all in one column? say col A
=IF(RIGHT(A1)="*",ROUND(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"*",""),3)&"*",IF(LEFT(A1)="(","("&ROUND(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"(",""),")",""),3)&")",ROUND(A1,3)))
this may be better preserves 3 decimal places even if its say 3.200
=IF(LEFT(A1)="(","(","")&TEXT(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"(",""),")",""),"*",""),"0.000")&IF(LEFT(A1)="(",")",IF(RIGHT(A1)="*","*",""))