

If you’re trying to use pi in an Excel formula and you are getting a #NAME? error, it’s because you’ve forgotten the opening and closing parentheses. There really isn’t much that can go wrong with the pi function, except for the #NAME? error. The pi function can also be used as an alternative to the RADIANS or DEGREES functions for converting from degrees to radians or vice versa. …and approximating the period of a pendulum: …calculating the volume of a sphere from the radius: …calculating the area of a circle from the radius: A few obvious examples are calculating the circumference of a circle from the diameter: There are many, many times when you may want to use pi in Excel formulas. See also How to Look Up Data in 3D Excel Tables When to Use Pi in Excel The pi function returns a constant number, so it doesn’t require any arguments. If you try to expand the number of decimals in the cell containing pi, any digits beyond the first 14 decimal places will be all zeroes.

And although Excel can display 30 decimal points in a single cell value, it’s precision is limited to 15 figures. Since pi is an irrational number, there is no limit to the number of decimals in it’s exact value. …and Excel returns the value of pi approximated to 15 figures, or 3.14159265358979. In that case you can type in any blank cell: The pi function can be found in the Math & Trig menu of Excel’s Formula tab:īut, unless you really like clicking in menus, you’d probably prefer to type the formula in a cell. Unless you’re the guy who memorized pi to over 70,000 digits, you can use a function to work with pi in Excel, instead of typing the number from memory.
