Happy July 4th!

Happy July 4^th, Everyone! I hope you are enjoying the holiday (with sincere apologies to my friends in the UK…)!

I am a great believer in Having Fun!  You’ve got to have fun in your life because, regardless of how you look at it, it’s all a game!  Since this is a holiday week here in the U.S., I thought it would be fun to revisit the somewhat impractical Excel function, ROMAN.  This function, rather obviously, converts ordinary Arabic numbers into Roman Numerals.  Useless, you say?  Well, still fun to play around with.

The syntax is as follows: ROMAN(number, type) or simply ROMAN(number) if you wish to accept the Classic Roman numeral format.

Let’s say you have the number 2014 in cell A1, in cell B1, insert the formula ROMAN(A1), and your result is MMXIV.  For a little more fun, try it out with a formula that calculates your current age:  =DATEDIF(birthdate, TODAY(), “y”).

Putting your birthdate in A1, and the How Old am I in Roman Numerals formula in B1 it would be expressed as =ROMAN(DATEDIF(A1,TODAY(),"y"))

If you were born on September 3, 1974, the result shown would be your age of 39 expressed as the Roman numeral, XXXIX.  What fun!

 

If 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 little Fun for your Fourth of July (that is, if you are a geek like me…).  Cheers!