Is there a way to reduce the precision of Matlab overall?

For my Power II course my professor has us doing Power Flow Analysis, and to speed things up I've coded an entire assignment into Matlab, and while my answers seem close to his own, he warns that he only used 4 decimal point precision. I'm curious if there is an easy way to reduce the precision of Matlab to better approximate my professor's answers? Might not be possible, but figured I would ask.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

There is no global preference of any kind to reduce precision.

You could experiment with feature('setprecision'); see http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/newsreader/view_thread/155369 and note that system_dependent() and feature() are the same thing.

You could also program using symbolic variables, in which case you can control the number of decimal digits used.

[Danny Miranda]

That's what I was afraid of. Thanks for the info, I'll definitely that out!

Answer 2

[Matthew Eicholtz]

Here is a simple way to change the precision of a result:

n = 4; % number of desired decimal points
x = round(x*10^n)/10^n;

Obviously, this doesn't change some global precision preference (I don't know if there is one), but it should help with your assignment.

[Danny Miranda]

I was playing around with this one earlier, but was hoping there would be some form of global precision preference. Thanks for your time!