The MMXVI Olympics

Excel users, as I am sure many of you will agree, can be a rather serious lot.  “Fun” does not seem to be in many guru’s vocabulary.  Although of no real Practical use, it can be interesting, (in a geeky sort of way), to play around with Roman Numerals. For an even very experienced Excel user, it is particularly interesting to find that an application has a built-in Roman numeral function.

Practicality, of course, can be overrated, and it is readily apparent that Hollywood, Football and, of course, the Olympics have all used Roman numerals on a regular basis. If you also wish to do something off-the-wall in an Excel report, (I probably wouldn’t recommend it for your next quarterly report to your boss, unless you are in the market for a new job soon…), you can use the Roman function.

For a classic numeral, (other formats are available, but why complicate things), simply enter a value in cell A1 and type, “=Roman(A1)” in cell B1. Hit Enter and Presto, a Roman numeral of the A1 number! If you typed in 2016 you will get the Roman Numeral representing this year’s Summer Olympics.  Pretty Cool!

If you are a Super Geek when it comes to Roman Numerals, and you want to explore this function a bit more, you can use the Second Argument option with the ROMAN function, which converts your results to varying levels of brevity.  Note the following values in the table below:

 

 

ROMAN Numerals.  A bit of Fun in this Olympic year!