Re: Help needed with terminology

[Win Day <winday -at- home -dot- com>]

At 04:33 PM 2/16/00 -0500, Chris Jackson wrote:
>>From: Suzette Seveny <sseveny -at- petvalu -dot- com>
>
>>I need help with a specific term used in financial systems.  I need to
tell the 
>>user to enter a number is a specific format - and I know there is a term
for 
>>this type of format.  Here is an example:
>>
>>Enter the Consumer Price Index (CPI) number with a significance of 2, i.e. 
>>1.03.
>
>I'm not a financial person, but couldn't you say
>
>"Enter the Consumer Price Index (CPI) number to two decimal places, for
>example, 1.03."
>
>Question: If the number were 1.30, does the use have to enter the hundreds
>place 0?  If yes, then I would state this as well and give a second example.
> And shouldn't it be "for example" rather than "that is"?
>

There's a major difference between the number of decimal places and the
number of significant digits.

If you can enter 1.03, you're using three significant digits, not two as
yuor example implied.  10.3 also has three significant digits, as does 103.

If you can enter 1.03 or 10.03 or 100.03, you can enter two decimal places.
 But the number of significant digits has changed.

See the difference?  I don't know how important significant digits are in
financial calculations; they are extremely important in scientific analysis.

Win
-------------

Win Day           
Technical Writer

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