Convert Decimal to Binary in 1 Minute or less

So you want to convert decimal into binary? Well I’m here to help. Converting decimal to binary is easy if you know how. You don’t need to be an engineer, a maths wizard or a tech geek to learn.

In fact there’s just one thing you need to know how to do:

Divide by 2

If you can do that, you’ll be able to convert decimal to binary. So let’s go.

The basic steps are as follows:

1 — Write down the number you want to convert

2 — Divide that number by 2 and write the result underneath

3 — If the result ends with .5 round it down

4 — Repeat steps 2 and 3 with the result until you arrive at 1

5 — Write 1 beside each odd number and 0 next to even numbers

6 — Write the 1s and 0s in a sequence starting from the bottom

If you’re anything like me, these instructions look a bit abstract. So let’s look at some examples and visuals.

Let’s suppose you want to convert the decimal number 74 to binary. We’ll start by writing it down.

Now we’ll divide it by 2. That gives us 37. Let’s write 37 underneath.

37 divided by 2 is 18.5. Remember that if a number ends in .5 just round it down and continue. So we’ll round it down to 18.

If we continue halving the numbers down to 1 we should get this:

Next let’s decide if these numbers are odd or even, writing a 0 for even numbers and a 1 for odd numbers.

Now we have our binary number, only it’s upside down. Remember that our binary number starts with the number at the bottom of our list.

So, if we start from the bottom, we can see that 74 in binary is 1001010.

That’s it!

That’s all you need to know to convert decimal to binary. Keep dividing by two, rounding down when there’s a .5, and then recording which numbers are odd and which are even.