What rules does Phoenix 6.3 use to round numbers when requesting significant figures and decimal places? Thanks
Hi Mary, I am not sure I follow your question; is there a specific file you have identified an issue with since standard rounding rules are applied, although you may be confused by a default display precision. i.e. the value DISPLAYED in the worksheet is e.g. 0.5185, however if you click on the actual cell you see the value to full precision is e.g. 0.5184825, (look in the top ‘bar’ of the worksheet’ So when tabulating etc. the full precision value is used and when set to display three significant figures will correctly give 0.518. If you want force a rounding earlier in your workflow then use a custom transform in a data wizard. If that’s unclear it is probably more useful to post an example workflow and then expalin what it is you are concerned about/trying to achieve. Simon
Hi Simon, I am trying to understand what Phoenix considers “Standard rounding rules”. For example, in R, the rounding rule for 5 is "For rounding off a 5, the IEC 60559 standard is expected to be used, ‘go to the even digit’. Is this the same rule in Phoenix? We are seeing rounding differences between Phoenix and R. Thanks
OK - I was wondering after I responded if that might be where you were coming from, in short, yes we are different to the implementation in R which is I believe called ‘round-to-even’ and I certainly see the potential advantages. However, I don’t recall a customer request to date and when we discussed the idea last time internally we found that other packages, were still doing it the ‘old’ way, (i.e. always round UP from 5), so we kept with that as our default e.g. this discussion in 2012 comparing R to MATLAB. Statistically Significant: Rounding in R However I certainly see the utility and will go back to the product manager and check the status of this enhancement suggestion since it will have to be carefully considered at what level of the application to apply this. I’ll let you know what comes of that. Simon.
Thank you Simon!
Hi Mary just to confirm this is indeed logged as a proposed enhancement (QC10330), however it will not make the 1.4 release coming out soon. When you see the release notes you will notice numbers like QC10330 next to fixes etc; and this is what you should look out for to confirm this has been added. Simon
Thank you for the information and update!