The Windows Calculator.
It can do more than you probably know.
And you might be thinking, "how exciting could a video about the calculator be?"
Well, I think pretty exciting actually, or at least interesting.
So by the end of this video you will be an expert on all the little extra features in
the calculator and how to use pretty much all of it.
And some of these features you may already know about, some of them not, but I'll just
go over everything.
One feature not many people know about is the Always On Top button.
It's pretty self explanatory, it moves the calculator to the corner and keeps it on top.
It's good if you're using the calculator with another program at the same time.
Another button you may have never tried clicking is that hamburger menu.
It slides out a whole menu with a whole bunch of different other options for the calculator
that we'll go over later, but I just want you to make sure you know that's there first
of all.
Here's another pretty big one.
While this is what the calculator looks like by default, if you extend it out horizontally,
you'll see more stuff show up.
You'll see the History and Memory menu come up.
I'll come back to the memory stuff, but the History option is pretty self explanatory.
It just shows you the calculations you've done previously, and you can also copy stuff
out of it.
Just makes it easier to remember what you typed in.
Another cool thing not many people realize is you can actually paste entire equations
into the calculator.
So say you copy this equation, 100 * 10 + 500 =. If you paste that into the calculator,
it will show the result, 1500, and it will actually even show each step in the History
menu too.
Now going back to the memory section, not many people probably bother learning how to
use this, but it can come in handy.
You'll notice a few buttons on the main part of the calculator, beginning with M, those
have to do with the memory.
So MS is memory store, MR is memory recall.
Pretty self explanatory.
You press MS, it stores the current number in the memory.
Memory recall takes it out and uses it.
And the M+ and M- value adds or subtracts to the memory value.
So say you store 20, and then you type in 50 and then hit M+, the stored value is now
70.
And you can store multiple values in the memory at a time.
And if you want to recall any one of them, you'll just click on it.
And if you hover over each value, it'll show the same operations we saw before.
But if you just click the main ones on the calculator, it will just use the most recent
memory value.
Now let's get into some keyboard shortcuts for the calculator.
Yes, there are actually quite a few.
First of all, I showed you, if you open up the hamburger menu, you'll see all kinds of
other calculators that are selectable.
So if you actually press Alt one through five, it will choose the first through fifth calculator
types.
So meaning the regular, the scientific, all the way down to the calendar.
And if you just want to bring up the hamburger menu in general, you can press Alt+H, stands
for hamburger.
Also, after pressing Alt+H, you can press Alt plus the first letter in one of the calculators
names to open that calculator, assuming there are not multiple calculators beginning with
that letter.
So for example, if you press Alt+H and then Alt+C, it will bring up the currency calculator.
V will bring up the volume.
But for some of them like A which has area as well as angle, if you just press that,
it won't do anything, you have to manually select those.
Another shortcut, if you press Alt+Up key, that will put the calculator into always on
top mode.
And if you press Alt+Down, it brings it out of that mode.
For the number being displayed, you can press F9 and that will swap between the positive
and negative value of it.
Shift+2 will take the square root of the number displayed.
And if you're in the scientific calculator, which I'll look at in a second, pressing F3,
F4, and F5 will swap between degrees, Radians, and Grad.
So before moving on, why don't I clear up some things that you might not have known
what these buttons do on the standard calculator.
And these actually apply usually to any calculator, even a physical one, not just this one.
So for example, the % button, say you wanted to calculate 20% of 100, you could do 100
times 20 and then hit %.
And that'll do 20.
Or what might be more useful is adding and subtracting percentages.
So say you wanted to calculate 9% sale tax on a $50 product.
And you want to get the total.
What you could do is do 50 plus 9%.
And that will give you 54.5 because it's basically like saying 50 plus 50 times 9%.
And the same goes for subtracting.
Next, if you're wondering what C versus CE does, the regular C will just clear out all
the stuff you've already entered, even if you've already hit an operation.
Whereas CE will only clear the currently displayed number.
But if you've already done an operation with another number, it will keep that one.
So it's basically like hitting the backspace a few times.
Now let's move on to the scientific calculator.
Not so many secrets here, I would say, but a lot of stuff that most people probably have
no idea what it does, but it's probably still good to know about.
So obviously here, you can see there's lots more options for operations and stuff than
the standard.
You can do arbitrary exponents like X to the Y or 10 to the X.
You do logarithms, natural logs, factorials, all that good stuff.
Then if you press the "2nd" button, that actually toggles alternate functions on those leftmost
buttons.
You can also press the EXP button to enter a number in exponential notation, or you can
press the F-E button to toggle between normal and exponential.
You can also use the modulus operator.
If you didn't know this was a thing, it basically gives you the remainder of a number.
So if you do five modulus two, it will be one because you divide by two and then the
remainder is one.
You also have the trigonometry functions, sine, cosine, tangent, and their inverses,
and several of these function options, which let me explain these because these might be
kind of interesting.
The first three, you might recognize absolute value, but the other two, maybe not, and I
didn't know about these, which are floor and ceiling.
Now absolute value, most people know, it basically just takes the positive number of whatever
you put in there.
So absolute value of negative five is still five.
Now how floor works is basically you always round down, in the sense that you always round
more negative.
So for example, floor 8.7 is 8, but if you're using a negative number, floor of -8.7 is
-9 because again, you're rounding towards the negative, and ceiling is the exact opposite.
You always round towards the positive.
So the ceiling of 8.7 is 9 and the ceiling of -8.7 is -8 because again, it's going more
positive.
So if you didn't know what these symbols were before, now you do.
The Rand button generates a random number between zero and one with 32 digits.
That may come in handy at some point.
And DMS is actually kind of interesting.
It stands for degrees, minutes, seconds.
So if you enter an angle like 10.5 degrees and then you hit DMS, it will actually convert
it to this format.
The first is degrees point minutes, seconds, and then sub seconds, I guess, whatever you'd
call that.
So 10.5 degrees is actually 10 degrees, three minutes.
So it says 10.3.
And if you press the degree button, that actually goes from degrees, minutes, seconds notation,
two degrees as a decimal.
So it goes the other way.
Next, we can take a look at the graphing calculator.
And some of you may have a flashback to calculus class.
By default, it'll just show the graph, but if you extend it further, it'll also show
the functions menu where you can actually enter a whole bunch of stuff.
So for example, if we use the classic Y=MX+B, it will automatically set B and M, but you
can also change what those are.
And then you can also set a minimum and max and use a slider to go between those two values.
And it will update on the graph accordingly.
You could also use multiple expressions and show them at once on the graph.
And it can even do function analysis, where it'll show whether the function has a maxima
or minimum, and any inflection points, the range, intercepts, stuff like that.
You can also graph inequalities like Y is greater than MX + B, and it will fill in the
area accordingly.
And you can use absolute value.
So if we change it to the absolute value of X, it will change to look like this.
And it can also do floor and ceiling, like I mentioned before.
And if you're wondering, that's what graphing the floor looks like.
If we move on to the programmer calculator, probably not many real world uses for most
people for this one, but I may as well talk about it.
What you can do is type in a number in regular decimal form, and then it will show you the
number in other formats and bases.
So for example, there's hex, which uses one through nine and A through F.
There's also decimal, which is zero through nine, what we know.
Octal is zero through seven, and binary is zeros and ones.
Getting a bit more advanced to say the least, we can click this bit toggling keypad.
And this actually shows you the value in binary.
So you can actually see what happens if you toggle an individual bit in that binary code
and see how it affects the value.
So if you're trying to learn computer science and how binary works, this might actually
be a useful tool.
It also lets you flip through a few different number of binary bits.
So Byte is 8 bits, Word is 16 bits.
DWORD is double word, that's 32 bits.
And QWORD is quad word, 64 bits.
You can also use bitwise functions.
Again, don't worry if you don't know about this, no normal person has to know this, but
you can do stuff like the AND or NOT.
And basically you can look at this diagram, this is from Reddit that pretty much illustrates
what all these functions do really better than I could ever explain it.
And if you're wondering what this has to do with the calculator, basically you can use
these operations on numbers.
So you might be thinking, wait a minute, how does that work?
For example, if you type in 20 AND 50, it equals 16.
What?
Well, basically what you do is you line up the two values in binary and then compare
it using whatever operator.
So if we're using AND for example, you take the two numbers in binary and the result is
going to be where both the first and second number have a one.
And in this case, there's only one of those.
So if we take that number in binary, it's 16.
And if we do 20 OR 50, we equal 54 because it's where either has a one and so on.
So you do that operation on each digit until you get the result, and the same would apply
for all the other bitwise operators.
Then there's the bit shift operation, which is way beyond my pay grade.
It has to do with shifting the binary values.
I did look up what each type does, but I'm not really sure how that setting affects these
calculations, so I'm not even going to touch this one.
So we can move on to the final calculator listed, which is the date calculator.
And this is pretty self explanatory.
You can either calculate the difference between days or you can add and subtract days.
And it just has you pick the dates on a calendar and then pretty much does what you would expect.
Now, as for the converters, you can see there are a whole bunch and you can scroll through
them actually.
I'm not going to go through every single one,
obviously you can pretty much guess which each one does, but I will mention a couple
interesting things I noticed in a few of these.
For the first one, currency, this one's interesting because it's the only one that has to be updated
through the internet because currency exchange rates are changing all the time.
So if you press Update Rates, that will get you the latest exchange rate.
So you'll know that you're up to date on that.
In the volume converter, you can see you have all the stuff you'd expect.
Like you have milliliters, liters, but I did notice that it has separate options for milliliters
and cubic centimeters despite them being the exact same thing.
Maybe it's for people who don't know the same thing, but I don't know why they don't just
put it in parentheses or something.
Also, you have cups, pints, gallons, all those, but what I didn't realize is apparently they're
different in the UK and US.
For example, if I do US teaspoons versus UK teaspoons, it's like 1.2.
Although you guys can let me know in the UK if you even use those units anyway.
For the rest of the converters, we have length, weight and mass, temperature, energy, area,
speed, time, power, pressure, angle, and data is one I can finish up on because it's probably
the most relevant to this channel.
And one interesting thing I can point out is you may have heard of megabytes and gigabytes
and terabytes, but have you heard of mebibytes, gibibytes, and tebibytes?
And these actually get mixed up all the time.
If we're strictly, technically speaking, 1000 megabytes is a gigabyte and 1024 mebibytes
is a gibibyte.
And the same goes for the other scales.
And the reason for the difference, by the way, is the gigabyte, megabyte, terabyte uses
base 10 and the gibibyte, megibyte, and tebibyte uses base two.
So two to the whatever power, that's where they come from.
So they're kind of similar, but different if you get bigger.
And that's actually why if you go and buy a storage device, like a hard drive or something
that's one terabyte large, and you go and install it into windows, you might notice
that it shows only 931 gigabytes.
What is up with that?
You're like, are they lying about the size?
No, it's because Windows actually measures size in gibibytes and tebibytes, but it displays
the wrong unit.
It should display it as GiB and TiB.
Those are the actual units.
But it shows the units for gigabytes and terabytes and stuff.
And there's even more added to the confusion from the fact that while hard drive manufacturers
use the base 10 value, stuff like RAM manufacturers use the base two.
So they all call it one gigabyte, it's just a mess.
Anyway, that went a little bit off topic, but by now you should be fully versed in the
Windows calculator.
You can show it off to your friends, show them some cool stuff or whatever.
If you enjoyed this video, maybe check out some of the more recent videos on my channel,
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And if you want to keep watching the next video I'd recommend, is where I was talking
about an alternative to Windows Explorer.
You might not have realized that, yeah, you don't have to use Windows Explorer.
Even that can be replaced by third party apps.
I'll put that link right there.
So thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.