for the most part engineers are used to working in multiple unit systems and
they're generally pretty comfortable with it
using the different units in converting between them but proper unit use and
conversions are actually very important there have been multiple famous
engineering disasters over time that can actually be attributed to using or
converting units and properly for this reason I want to share with you my
fourth excel tip that every engineers should know the convert function so
let's say just for a quick example we want to convert a value of two inches to
millimeters Excel has a great built-in feature that can easily do that and all
you need to feed it is a unit code basically and then the value you want to
convert and then it'll convert that for you so if we go ahead and enter in that
function right here so we're gonna convert convert is the
function here now what is the number that we're going to convert and then the
from unit so you can see it gives us a list all these different units that
Excel has built in which is great I can't think of any that are in here that
by an engineer might need to use that that isn't actually in this list so I
think it's a pretty comprehensive list should have everything for the most part
that you would ever need as an engineer so I'm going to convert from my from
unit is going to be the inches to millimeters so if we just select those
two cells and feed that those two unit codes into the function then we will get
a value of 50 point eight millimeters which is exactly two inches so another
quick example let's take a value of 10 psi and convert that to mega pascals
and the convert function is actually case sensitive and that's very important
to know we need to make sure that the code for the unit that we're using is
entered correctly so the capital M stands for mega and then capital P a is
the Pascal's so if we use the convert function again convert this ten value
from psi to megapascals so now we looked at some
examples I just wanted to show you I have this list of all the different
codes that we have to use in this function so you can see the unit type
here so weight and mass we have grams slugs pounds you the atomic mass unit
and then honest mass and then we have distance meter yards time pressure force
energy so for pressure we used Pascal's even magnetism temperature and then down
here this is a list of the prefixes so these prefixes can be used to actually
modify the metric unit codes so you could for example add a capital m in
front of the G for grams to get mega grams or milligrams for the cab a
lowercase M so lots of different options there for units I got this list from
online and then I just kind of customized it into my own nice little
table here and the reason for that is in the next video or in an upcoming video
I'm actually going to show you how to make a handy
I guess unit converter utility where we can actually select say from a drop-down
on the unit type so I'll say we want to work in weight and mass so we'll select
weight and mass first and then we'll have two drop downs for the units here
where it'll only show us the available units based on that unit type category
up there so we'll dive into that in the next video but I'm gonna show you how to
make a nice little handy unit convert conversion sheet using Excel so thanks
for watching I hope you found this valuable I know a lot of people probably
already knew about this one but it's so handy that I just had to make a video
about it if you're not subscribed already make sure to subscribe so you
can get all my videos as a release I try to release the video every week or two
and make sure to share this video with all your engineering friends so they can
check out this awesome tip as well and remember this channel is for you so if
you have any video suggestions make sure to leave a comment down below and let me
know what you all want to see thanks again for watching we'll see you next
time