Rounding Up to the Next Half

Terry has a need to round numbers up to the next 0.5. This means that a number such as 1.1 would round up to 1.5, but 1.6 would round up to 2.0. He tried using MROUND, but it only rounds to the nearest half (1.1 becomes 1.0 and 1.6 becomes 1.5).

Excel provides several different functions that you can use for different rounding purposes, such as ROUND, ROUNDUP, ROUNDDOWN, MROUND, FLOOR, CEILING, etc. Each of these has been discussed fully in other issues of ExcelTips. In this particular instance, CEILING would probably be the best solution:

=CEILING(A1,0.5)

This rounds the value in A1 upwards, to the next half. Actually, CEILING rounds away from 0, which means that positive numbers are rounded up but negative numbers are rounded down, away from zero. (For example, -1.1 would be rounded to -1.5, not to 1.0.)

Of course, there are multiple ways to do various tasks in Excel, and this type of rounding is no exception. If you would rather use ROUNDUP instead of CEILING, you could use the following formula:

=ROUNDUP(A1*2,0)/2

If you prefer to use MROUND, you could do the following:

=MROUND(A1+0.24999999,0.5)

This works because you are adding a value (0.249999) that always pushes MROUND over the half-way "tipping point" to force the result upwards.

These are just a few of the easy ways to accomplish the desired result. There are many other ways using the other rounding functions, as well.