Secrets of The Windows Calculator

Did you know it could do all this?

▼ Time Stamps: ▼
0:00 - Intro
0:17 - General Lesser-Known Features
2:10 - Keyboard Shortcuts
3:29 - A Couple Clarifications
4:25 - Scientific Calculator
6:47 - Graphing Calculator
7:49 - Programmer Calculator
10:04 - Date Calculator
10:19 - Converters
11:27 - Data Values Fun Facts

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[PiTheGuyAlt]

I never knew I needed a 13 minute video on the windows calculator. It’s a lot more advanced than I thought

[JLSXMK]

Half of this video would make the ultimate intro to Computer Science. It's good that you talked about the "Programmer" section; because that contains THE MOST COMMON operations that newbie programmers should know about (i.e., bit shift, the logical operators, the "modulo" operator). Fantastic!

[stephenalexander]

Excellent! There are a number of things in here that I didn't know. One point: DMS is a fixed format notation. In other words, 10.5 degrees is not 10 degrees and 3 minutes. 10.5 degrees is 10 degrees 30 minutes, even though the calculator presents it as 10.3 -- the trailing 0 is not displayed. 10.1 degrees in DMS is 10.06, or 10 degrees, 6 minutes.

[bobknip]

One of my favorite features is reciprocal (1/X, or X^-1 on other calculators). Its keyboard shortcut is simply 'R'.
I find this useful when deciding to say if X is some percentage of Y or vice versa. E.g. 4/5=0.8, then [1/X] = 1.25 (5/4). You can toggle (repeatedly) between the two values, instead of having to enter the other calculation.
I also use this when calculating the price of a product per unit (e.g. € per kg), without having to think about whether to enter the price or the package amount first. You can immediately start entering the first number you come across. Then divide by the other number. If it doesn't make sense, take the reciprocal.

[starksuman]

And there is a company still trying to develop worlds best calculator app for decades.

[lforlight]

Shifts are simple. Shifting right makes every digit move one step to the right. Left moves left. Logical shift does that, and in the bit in the end that doesn't have anything slide into it, it puts 0. So logical shift right of 1101 would be 0110, and a shift left of 1101 would be 1010. With binary numbers, this is very similar to multiplying and dividing by 2, corresponding to shifting left and right respectively. However, negative numbers (2's complement) must have 1 in their leftmost bit, and adding more 1's to their left are like adding more 0's before any number you know - it does nothing. So arithmetic shift does the same as logical shift, except when shifting right it fills in the leftmost bit with the previously-leftmost bit. 1100 (-4) shifted right arithmetically is 1110 (-2) and shifted left is 1000 (-8). Circular shift just takes the discarded bit in the far end and puts it back into the vacant bit at the start. Rotate through carry does the same thing, except it uses a storage bit of a certain arithmetic significance. It's a handy way of extracting its value and testing it, and then you can shift the other way and retrieve your original number.

[NicolasChanCSY]

I hope Microsoft can bring clearer indications of shortcut keys!
I love the way traditional Windows applications show their shortcut keys. For example, using an underlined letter in the button text to indicate Alt+<that letter> being a shortcut, or showing a tooltip after pressing Alt, or showing the shortcut key of the button when we hover it.

Somehow, such simple hints seem to be lost in more recent Windows applications, even in Office suite software. For example, pressing Alt in Teams shows nothing and I cannot select different elements easily without my mouse or tapping Tab a thousand times. And from what I have heard, in File Explorer, I still cannot jump between main content and navigation bar easily.


I wish Microsoft will take a deeper look at how they hint the shortcuts.

[bmanthree]

programmer calculator is the most useful imo. Not only for converting between hex and decimal, but also for setting individual bits and seeing what the resulting hex value is. Good for finding what value a mode or command register should be or something like that. The bit shift is also pretty useful if a register uses only the higher n bits of a value. For memory mapping in x86, you use the top 10 bits for the directory, next 10 bits for the page, and the bottom 12 bits for the address in the page. Right shifting by 10 and 20 is an easy way to get the directory and page numbers.

[_SJ]

Me: I wonder if he can make a 13 minute long video about Windows Calculator exciting? 🤔

13 minutes later: More!!!

[Kadori]

Even in college I never understood how memory worked on a calculator.... This would been so FUCKING USEFUL ON MY MIDTERM

[lightningsam]

I wasn’t aware, windows calculator has built in plotting capabilities. I use to go to wolfram alpha for all my plotting needs. Thanks ThioJoe!

[thepoliticalstartrek]

Fun fact about the Calculator up to Windows 8. Every computer that had it had a major security weak point. It could access the system memory and protected areas of the CPU. It is difficult to exploit put can be to gain access to system memory and CPU. Fixed when the Windows App Store version was released.

[y_fam_goeglyd]

Teaspoons and tablespoons (pretty much 5 & 15 ml) are still used in recipes in the UK, particularly in older books. We have everything in metric by law, but depending on what you're looking at, it might well have imperial measurements too. Our non-metric weights & measures tend to be a bit bugger than yours of the same name. A gallon is 4.54 litres, whereas I believe that US gallons are 4. I could be wrong! Our pints are 4 fl oz bigger for definite, and unless we have a US cookbook, we don't use cups.
HTH :)

Thanks for the info about the calculator, I had never bothered to look at it because I have a cracking free one on my phone (HiPER) and a graphics calculator pro version that I got free (my favourite price). When my eldest went to uni to be an engineer (though he became a scientist instead) I bought him _the_ Texas graphics calculator that all students of maths have (I was lucky, my uni leant me one, 21 years ago. I was a "mature" student - by age if not by description) and the software to go with it. Even though it's been 13 years since he first went, I remember it cost me £114 in total! Fortunately I still had my "how to use the calculator" book, which is massive!

[stagefan]

I did not know they had integrated some of features of geogebra and desmos into calc. Thanks, you are always helpful.

[radicalrick]

*As a tech guru (40+years), I thought I knew just about everything there's to know. Seriously, I didn't know about that calculator simple Always on Top features! And I have a few of "Stay on Top Apps!" Again, this show that we do indeed still learn something new every day, no matter how much we think we know.*

[linkinbreak]

Not that it would help for a video almost 2 months old, but after the hamburger menu is open, if you press Alt again, you can see the letter shortcut for what you want. So, your example for Area and Angle, you actual type "AR" for area and "AN" for angle.

[gettingbetter]

The older versions of Windows Calculator (the classic 9x/XP one and the Windows 7/8 one, which still exists in some Windows 10-based systems) also had a Statistics mode, where you could calculate the mean value, the sum or standard deviation of given values. Of course you can do it in Excel, but I don't know why that was removed from Windows 10 calculator.

[nathanisbored]

i think the reason for the mebibyte confusion is that historically they always used powers of 2 and called them megabytes, and then at some point in the late 90s some organization decided that was confusing since those prefixes usually refer to powers of 10. so they made up new words like mebibyte to retcon the old terminology and try to make a new standard, but not everyone adopted the new standard. so some people still use the old definition of megabyte using powers of 2, and some use the new one and use mebi for legacy reasons or to convert them. and some people just never got the memo that theres a difference at all. probably the people that never switched are older programmers that got used to the old standard, or its a backwards compatibility thing (we all know how much windows loves backwards compatibility).

[victor.-]

"dms" converts degrees into degrees, but the decimal part is converted into base 60. So 10.5 degrees is (as with 10.5 hours) 10 degrees and 30 minutes. Not 10 degrees and 3 minutes. It is a weird function.

[SlitDiver]

I've been a subscriber ever since you released that satire video of you washing a motherboard to get rid of viruses. That was YEARS ago. You, still, never disappoint with your content. I've been programming on Windows 10 since it came out, and used the programming calculator and the other converter calcs countless times. Im blown away by all the shit I have been over looking for years. Typically, I would just create a quick and dirty calc in my IDE to get me by, but the game has just been changed.