How To Use The CONVERT Function to Translate Between Different Units
Do you ever need to convert between different measurement systems? It’s more of a problem in the US, where the last Imperialists stubbornly cling to archaic units in the face of the rest of the world metricating. They inflict units like ounces, gallons, acres, feet and inches on us. What are they talking about?
Never stress, though, Excel can help. The CONVERT Function can do a large number of conversions for you. For example:
| Description | Value | Formula |
| 1 mile in km | 1.609344 | =CONVERT(1,”mi”,”km”) |
| 1 mile in metres | 1609.344 | =CONVERT(1,”mi”,”m”) |
| 1 pint in litres | 0.473 | =CONVERT(1,”pt”,”l”) |
| 1 cup in litres | 0.237 | =CONVERT(1,”cup”,”l”) |
| 1 ounce mass in grams | 28.350 | =CONVERT(1,”ozm”,”g”) |
| 1 International acre in ha | 0.4047 | =CONVERT(1,”uk_acre”,”ha”) |
| 1 parsec in light-years | 3.2616 | =CONVERT(1,”parsec”,”ly”) |
| 1 parsec in km | 3.086E+13 | =CONVERT(1,”parsec”,”km”) |
To see the full list of abbreviations (some of which will show up as you type the formula), visit this page of Microsoft Help. That page is also interesting for the list of unit prefixes near the end, like yotta (10^24), zetta (10^21), femto, atto, and zepto! The Wikipedia page “Orders of Magnitude” is also interesting in this regard.