Word has a hidden calculator but Google’s online calculator is much better.
If you spend lots of time in Word, you’ll find its calculator extremely useful; it’s much easier to get a result within the program you’re using than by having to load up an external application.
However, if your browser is open as often as your word processor, then there’s a much more flexible calculator near at hand: the one built into Google. Google has more calculator options than anything provided by Microsoft (short of opening Excel for ‘one-off’ calculations) and some that are hard to replicate in Office such as recent currency rates.
In case you haven’t discovered it, here are just a few of the calculations you can perform directly from Google’s search box. Of course, all these results can be selected and copied into Word, Excel, Powerpoint or any other Windows program.
* Toss it equations with basic operators such as +, -, * and /.
* Go a little fancier and find the remainder of a division using modulo (%):
527%19
99 modulo 4
* Calculate roots:
9th root of 40353607
* Factorials:
9!
* You can even use trig and log functions or work in octal, hex or binary by using the prefixes 0o, 0x and 0b respectively.
* Use the “in” operator to convert from one value to another. For example, all the following will work:
7901 yards in kilometres
2010 in roman numerals
44 kph in knots
5 troy ounces in lbs
0.0000002 speed of light in miles per century
speed of light in furlongs per fortnight
(one favorite nerd trick with Google is to convert the speed of light into the alliterative ‘furlongs per fortnight’).
There’s also a currency converter. Try typing:
us dollars in australian dollars
Up pops the USD/AUD conversion rate.
If you like, you can be far more specific:
7 pounds sterling in danish krone
Or how about this:
2.9 usd per gallon in aud per litre
which is a fast way to compare petrol prices across the globe. Up to now that had been messy with both currency and metric/imperial differences. Our US readers might want to try this trick with other developed countries (UK, France, Finland, Australia) to see how ‘expensive’ US gas really is.
The Currency Converter handles both international currency abbreviations (AUD, GBP, JPY) and common names for currencies (Australian dollar, pound sterling, British pound, Indian rupee). When only one country uses a particular name for a currency, such as Japanese yen or Thai baht, you can omit the country name and use the currency term by itself, although some smaller countries’ currencies are not recognized. If you just type “dollars” Google will assume you mean US dollars.
The important thing when doing currency conversions with Google is to use the “in” operator between the terms in your expression.
Keep in mind that the rates used are the full commercial rates which are several percentage points better than anything available to individuals via credit card or cash transactions.
Want more? Check out Google’s calculator help page.
