Last weekend I set up a little spreadsheet in Excel to compare the cost of a trip in a rented RV versus a small car. The only gas consumption numbers I could find for the RV were in miles per gallon. Since we use the metric system here in Canada, I needed to convert everything to kilometres and litres.

Fortunately, Excel has a CONVERT worksheet function that makes the conversion easy. The only tricky part is remembering the codes for each type of unit. Most are intuitive, such as ft for foot and g for gram, but a few aren’t, like lbm for pound mass.

To calculate how many litres are in a gallon, I used the formula:
        =CONVERT(1, “gal”,”l”)

In the formula, gal is the code for gallon, and l (lower case L) is the code for litre. And yes, it’s way more expensive to make the trip in an RV.