Truncating With INT and TRUNC

Sometimes you do not want to round at all. You just want to chop the decimals off and keep the whole number part. That is called truncating.

Excel and Google Sheets give you two tools for this: INT and TRUNC. They look similar but behave differently with negative numbers, which is the heart of this lesson.

INT takes one argument and rounds the number down to the nearest integer. Down here means toward negative infinity, not toward zero.

For positive numbers this simply drops the decimals. So =INT(7.9) returns 7 and =INT(7.1) also returns 7. The fractional part is discarded.