Marnie, speak! Good girl.

In this tutorial, we're going to learn about:

• Rounding
  • Round to a whole number
  • Round to the nearest Even or Odd number or Round, Round Up or Round Down
  • Round to a multiple
  • Round to a multiple plus

In future tutorials, we'll look at:

• Evenly spacing shaping
  • Every X rows Y times
  • Next and every X rows Y times
• Intro to IF statements
• Calculating finished garment measurements
• Calculating yardage based on a sample
• Putting your numbers into MS Word

Sounds like more fun than a root canal, huh? Well, once you get the basic premise of these options, you'll be able to put them in a template and copy and paste them as needed. All of the formulas I'll discuss are in the spreadsheet, so you can see them in action, which is always more helpful than seeing them out of context.

The spreadsheet

The spreadsheet has 4 distinct sections.

The whole spreadsheet

Rounding

For the most part, I use rounding to give me whole numbers based on my raw calculations. No one can cast on 34.583 stitches, they need some real numbers to work with. By using MROUND* to convert my calculations, instead of simply hand keying the closest whole number in, I can have the numbers automatically update on the fly, if I go back and change something in the Sloper/Garment Measurements section of the document.

*NOTE: Round can be used the same way, if you prefer.

Round to a whole number

MROUND is used as follows:

= MROUND(ValueToRound, MultipleToRoundTo)

So, if we look at row 45 of the spreadsheet

Row 45 indicates to Dec X number of times. I have stacked the two sides vertically so you won't need to scroll right and left to see it.

The values under the orange header are decimals. To get the rounded values under the green header, I use MROUND as follows.

For size XS

=MROUND(C45,1)

Round to an Even or Odd number or Round Up or Down

Sometimes, you don't want to round to a particular multiple, you want an even or odd number. We'll look at an example of this in an upcoming tutorial. You can see it in action on row 73 of the spreadsheet. Use the command as follows.

=EVEN(value)

=ODD(value)

Alternately, you could simply round, round up or round down. We'll be using these functions when we calculate shaping intervals. You can see ROUNDDOWN on row 47 of the spreadsheet. Round (up/down) is used to round to a particular decimal point. To round to a whole number, use zero as the second number. To use these options, the formulas are as follows:

=ROUND(value, DecimalToRound)
Rounds to the closest number to the designated decimal place

=ROUNDUP(value, DecimalToRound)
Rounds up to the to the indicated decimal place

=ROUNDDOWN(value, DecimalToRound)
Rounds up to the to the indicated decimal place

For example, on row 47, size XS, we have the following formula

ROUNDDOWN((M46/M45),0) which takes the raw value of 5.463537906 and gives us 5

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Rounding to a multiple (other than 1)

Going back to MROUND, we can use the pattern multiple we set up at the top of the document

This pattern is done in a multiple of 5 plus 4. Multiple has been named "mult" and the plus has been named "plus".

Looking at our cast on row, 43, we are knitting in the round. Plus stitches are used for flat knitting, so we won't need that. Since we are knitting the front and back, we want to double the multiple.

For the XS size, my raw calculations say to cast on 154.5 stitches (cell C43). For my final calculations I'll use the following formula

=MROUND(C43,(mult*2))

Our final value (cell M43) is 150 stitches which is a whole number that is divisible by double our multiple.

Round to a multiple plus

To round to the closest multiple plus (mult of 5 +4) we need to add a few extra elements. It looks complicated but I'll break it down for you so it makes more sense.

=(MROUND((C43-plus), mult))+plus

Our final value (cell M44) is 154, which is a multiple of 5, plus 4 additional stitches.

In closing.

This tutorial covered all different sorts of rounding options. The spreadsheet shows you the ways I use them, but you might be able to find innovative ways to use these same formulas in your own spreadsheet.

I plan to cover the remaining topics in upcoming tutorials. Feel free to leave a note if you have any recommendations for people using this tutorial or if you have any requests for future topics

And keep in mind that these are just suggestions. I'm neither an Excel expert nor a skilled mathematician and there are probably a dozen other ways to go about getting accurate results. Don't be afraid to follow your intuition and change the formulas, if you think there's a better way.