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August 18, 2006
Vishy's Useless Factoid of the Day: Windows calculator keyboard shortcuts
Anyone using the Windows Calculator is struck by how zealously it tries to emulate a real-world calculator. In fact, so striking is the imitation that the limitations of a meatspace calculator get carried over to cyberspace as well.
Most operations in Windows Calculator involve pointing and clicking, actions that need a lot more dexterity in cyberspace than in meatspace. When entering a complex expression with brackets, such as a compound interest calculation, there is no way of seeing the whole expression at once to make sure there are no mistakes. Meatspace calculators (except graphical ones) don't show brackets for reasons of simplicity and economy. But when I pay $1000 for a computer running Windows, I want a calculator application that uses its medium of expression well, rather than an imitation saddled with all the restrictions of its meatspace analogue.
Having said that, there is more to Windows Calculator than immediately meets the eye. Earlier, I was confident that Windows Calculator only recognizes numeric keys from the keyboard. The other day, I was idly tapping my keyboard with Windows Calculator in focus, and I accidentally found that pressing some letter keys also changed its display. After checking the online help for clues about these effects (and failing miserably), I set out on a systematic mission to find what each key does. To use these letter keys, enter a number into the display and press the key for the function you want:
Trigonometric functions
Pressing these keys gives different results depending on whether the numbers you enter are in degrees, radians or grads.
S - sine
O - cosine
T - tangent
Hyperbolic and inverse versions of these functions are also available. See below.
[Why not use C for cosine, especially when C is not bound to the traditional 'Clear' function of a calculator? -V]
Logarithmic and exponential functions
L - common logarithm (base 10)
N - natural logarithm (base e)
X - to enter a number in scientific notation. The key sequence '3 X 2' stands for 3e+02, or 300
V - convert to normalized scientific notation, where the mantissa, the part before the e, is less than 10.
Modifiers
H - hyperbolic mode: calculates hyperbolic trigonometric functions; e.g. '45 H S' would calculate the hyperbolic sine of 45.
I - inverse mode: inverts any of the functions above; e.g. '90 H O' would calculate the inverse cosine of 90. Very useful to me while conducting this investigation.
Other functions
P - fills the display with the value of pi
R - reciprocal
[If they could use P for pi, why not E for e (2.71828...)? -V]
And finally, the poor man's Excel
Calculator also provides a rudimentary statistical toolkit that can be used to run basic analytics on a series of data points. The menus are silent about this feature, as is the four-function mode. The scientific mode only has a cryptic Sta button. But given how counterintuitive the user interface of this feature is, its clandestineness may be calculated (no pun intended).
Hit Ctrl+S to bring up the statistics toolbox. Then, click on the main calculator window, enter a data point and hit the Dat button. Rinse. Repeat. After the Sta window is populated with data points, the Ave, Sum and s buttons spit out the mean, the sum and the standard deviation of the population respectively. The CD and CAD buttons remove data points from the population.
This statistical toolkit suffices for one-off statistical calculations, but God forbid anybody actually has to use it for a living.
Conclusion
Microsoft can really do a lot with Windows Calculator, if they dust off its wide-eyed-intern-contributed codebase and take a second look at it. How about taking some inspiration from one that seems to understand basic natural language? Until then, I hope the above tips make it more keyboard friendly and a little less irritating.
Posted by Vishy at August 18, 2006 12:55 AM