Mint is one of the best free online budgeting systems, but if you don’t think you need something that elaborate, there are several other free sites for doing month-to-month budget calculations.

The Budget Calculator

This aptly named budget calculator is straightforward and includes expense boxes for many of the most typical types of fixed and non-fixed expenses—rent or mortgage, electricity, water, phone, Internet, etc. You need to input of course what applies to your personal finances.  It also contains boxes for monthly savings, IRA, and investments.

After you enter the amounts and press “Calculate Budget” you can view and print out your budget for the month. As the site points out, “If the amount you get is a negative number check your expenses and savings to find out what is causing you to spend more than you make, and if you have money left over, put more money into savings or put it towards ‘Fun and Entertainment‘”.

Budget Calculator

This calculator is not as extensive as the one above, but if your expenses are limited to the basics – rent or mortgage, one or two credit cards, car loan, entertainment, etc – then this calculator is useful for quick results.

College Budgeting Calculator

If going to college is in your plans, the banking website, Chase.com, has a free student loan and budget calculator that computes your assets. This includes job income, scholarships, grants, parents/other, and your expenses – tuition, books and fees, room board, etc.

Free Financial Advice

Free Financial Advice also has a basic budget calculator, but it also features lots of short article advice for personal finance management and savings, including investing for beginners, ideas for earning extra money, saving gas, clothing, computer software, landscaping, paying off debts, etc.

Free Financial Advice doesn’t require you to register or provide your email.

DebtSteps

DebtSteps has three extensive budget and loan calculators – Free Household Budget Form, Mortgage Payment Calculator, and a Credit Card Payoff Calculator.

When you click on the household budget form, select the Print View option at the bottom of the page, and you will get a very extensive list for income and assets boxes, and numerous one for expenses – including unsecured debts, and gifts and donations.

Home Budget Calculator

Home Budget Calculator does what the above calculators do, but it includes two other unique features. It provides data boxes for you and your spouse’s income as well as more specific data, such as your tax withholdings, FICA, and retirement deductions or expenses.

The calculator also includes a visual pie chart that depicts your monthly expenses.

Frugalpig

Frugalpig is a site dedicated to providing readers with tips and strategies for frugal living. It includes its own budget calculator for finding what the site calls “budget leaks”. If you need or want an old fashion pen and paper method for budgeting, you can also download the site’s free PDF family budget worksheet.

Frugalpig also provides lots of tips about saving money on groceries, gas, home expenses, entertainment, and shopping in general.

Bankrate

When you get into the habit of creating and maintaining a budget, you will typically start looking for how you can tighten your budget to either meet monthly expenses, pay off a huge debt, or create emergency savings.

Bankrate has a budget calculator as well, but it also includes several other budget calculators for mortgages, auto loans, credit card transfers, and home equity calculations.

Also, check out these articles for other online and software tools about budget keeping:

Manage Your Money Safely with ClearCheckbook – Daniel
Save Money and Track Your Finances with Mint – Karl
How To Use Mint To Manage Your Budget & Spendings Online – Bakari

Let us know what you think of these sites and which online financial tools you have found useful for controlling your budget.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

It is serious stuff and for long was a matter of national pride as the U.S and U.K went head to head with their measurement systems. Thankfully, the SI system became the universal standard. For me, it was just my homework and the headache of getting my pounds and pints right. Kilograms and liters (or is it litres?) seemed so much easier. Online unit converters and calculators save the day today. It’s no longer a case of 1,000,000 headaches = 1 mega-headache as online unit converters do the math with a click.

Here are ten of them.

Sooeet

It is an offbeat name for an all-in-one unit converter. The free online tool covers all the common conversions you might use in your daily life; some purely mathematical and others (clothing size, cooking) for functional. Exchange rate calculators again are one useful tool that gives you the currency conversions with a fair degree of real time accuracy. (See Directory mention)

Converticious

The free online converter handles temperature, volume, distance, weight, area, data, time, and speed unit conversions. The interface is very user-friendly with large icons and bulleted units which you can select for your instant conversion needs. (See Directory mention)

Convert Center

Engineering students and others too can make use of the variety of conversion options on this site. Molar mass unit conversions or frequency wavelength unit conversions will appeal to the scientifically minded. I am more interested in finding out how many gallons I can get to the liter with the fuel conversion tool. (See Directory mention)

Convert World

Convertworld.com ratchets up with a few more options like wind speed conversion, absorbed dose tool, TV & monitor size converter, and a ‘language’ conversion tool, among a lot of other scientific options. You can view the converters by selecting from your choice of 28 languages. (See Directory mention)

Conversion Tool

This cool looking conversion tool supports just three measurements – Length, Temperature, and Weight. But if you are looking to equalize how the Americans say it as against the British, this simple tool should do the job quickly. Put in the figure, select the unit and out pops the equivalent measurement on the other scale. (See Directory mention)

Online Conversion

Onlineconversion.com is another simple free online unit converter that has calculators relating to nearly 5,000 units, and 50,000 conversions. They are arranged in categories on the landing page. Check out the Miscellaneous category which has measurement tools for cholesterol, blood sugar, blood-alcohol content, GPA, wind chill, room area, typography, and a lot of other offbeat calculators.

Unit Converters

Unit Converters is another simple site to the extent of its interface. Otherwise, the online service is chock-a-bloc with scientific and engineering unit converters ranging from the common to the more technical ones like radiology and magnetism.

Online Converter

The one unique conversion tool I found on this otherwise simple site is the tool that takes a piece of text and converts it into the dots and dashes of Morse Code. The other unit converters relate to the usual lineup of time, distance, pressure, energy and work, volume, speed etc.

Metric Conversions

Metric-conversions.org is worth a mention not because it contains a unique conversion tool but because it is the only one I came across that lets you download ‘cheat sheets’ of conversion tables in printable formats. Inspite of the presence of one-click online tools, the printable downloads could serve as handy reference.

Converter (Firefox Add-on)

Converter is a useful Firefox add-on that works seamlessly with any figures you might have on the web page. It works via the right-click menu (select a figure and right click to see the options) or via the neat add-on bar where a single click converts all measurements on the page. You can also setup a custom conversion by right clicking on the icon on the add-on bar and entering your measurement values.

Of course, if you are an expert Google user, you can simply use the Google search bar for some quick fire unit conversions and calculations. You can even use the powerful Wolfram Alpha engine. But these ten web tools do give you broader options. Each one of the ten tools brings something new to the table. Do you have your own free online unit conversion web app to add to the list?

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

With a simple program from Microsoft named Microsoft Mathematics 4.0, you have the full power of a graphing calculator – and more – right at your computer.

Let’s go over some of the neat features this program provides and how it can help with homework or other math functions.

When you launch the program you have an interface that is very similar to any other graphing calculator. You can enter your numbers and calculations directly into the program by either pressing the buttons with your mouse or just typing it in.

Think of it as the built-in Windows ‘calc’ program on steroids.

You can also draw your calculations and Mathematics will try to decipher your drawing into an equation. This is helpful if you receive an problem but don’t know exactly how to enter it into the program. It works fairly well, but does have some difficulty decoding some more complicated equations.

Of course the core of a graphic calculating program is the graphs it can make. Entering the equations into the “equation” portion of the program allows you to graph multiple lines on the same chart.

Once you get used to the program, you can actually get very fancy with your graphs. Entering the right commands in the software will translate to a graph on the worksheet:

Another interesting portion of the program is the equation solver. Once you type in an equation it will help you step through to solve it for one of the variables you have listed. After it is solved, you can then graph it in 2d or 3d to help visualize the equation and learn what it actually does.

If you are interested in learning how you can apply Microsoft Mathematics to help your child or student learn mathematics, Microsoft offers this free guide to give you learning ideas.

The Equation Library built into the program also gets you started on some interesting ways you can enter data into the program.

The final feature I’d like to go over is the Triangle Solver. The solver takes all of the legwork out of figuring out the remaining angles or length of a triangle and will also let you know exactly what type of triangle it is.

On a personal note, when I was going through high school I relied heavily on a graphing calculator to do all of my work for me. Although I was very good at translating problems into a format the calculator can read, I ignored the underlying concepts which lead me to receive good grades, at least for the mean time. Once I went to college and was no longer able to use a calculator I had a very tough time adjusting. Please make sure to use this program responsibly and actually learn the underlying principles.

Microsoft Mathematics 4.0 can be downloaded here and is free. It is only available for Windows, however if you have VirtualBox you will be able to run it on any other OS.

Have you used Microsoft Mathematics before? Do you know of some alternative software you can use in place of it? Let us know in the comments below!

Windows 7 has gone in for a renovation and the new Windows 7 Calculator leaps ahead of its predecessors. It has multiple modes (Scientific, Programmer, and Statistics), conversion features, worksheets to work out your fuel economy, lease payments, and mortgage payments, and a few more nice touches. There’s of course, the neat look too.

But it’s still not as advanced as a section of users would like.

Thankfully, other free calculators come in various flavors. From the dirt simple Google search bar to the gallery of browser add-ons. Then you can factor in these five free calculation tools (simple to advanced) that should stand up to the numbers you throw at it.

SFR Calculator

SFR Calculator has an MS Office-like interface. It also gives you a choice of three skins. Unlike other free calculators, its use is similar to the kind we do on paper. You can use it like a text editor and add comments or any other annotations to your calculations. The advantage of the tape style of calculations is that the calculations can be kept as records and even printed out. The calculator may not be suitable for power users but can be used to perform accounting operations.

SFR Calculator (ver.4.0.6) is an 8.6MB free calculator download. It is supported on Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, and Windows 7. Versions of SFR Calculator are available for Windows Mobile and the iPhone.

Moffsoft FreeCalc

Moffsoft FreeCalc is also similar to the above application in the way it uses a printable and savable interface (“˜tape’). You can set the display to use different color schemes. Numbers to be calculated can be neatly arranges in groups on the tape. The calculator is very light on resources and can be quickly accessed from the system tray.

Moffsoft FreeCalc (ver.2.0) is a 764KB download. It is supported on older Windows OS, Vista, and Windows 7.

SpeedCrunch

SpeedCrunch comes as an installer and also in a portable version. It has a clean user interface and a very intuitive response to your inputs. SpeedCrunch calculates even as you type and this auto-completion behavior is quite handy when it comes to result speed. Results are precise up to 50 decimal points. Syntax highlighting also minimizes errors as you type. You can feed in formulas, constants, and functions from the extensive library that’s available. SpeedCrunch supports unlimited range of alpha-numeric variables and it also lets you store your own for later use. If the stored variables are too many, there’s a handy search bar to help locate them.

SpeedCrunch records everything in history and you can easily recall and reuse a previous expression. You can also save a session for later use.

SpeedCrunch (ver. 0.10.1) is a 2.4MB download. It is supported on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Also read: SpeedCrunch ““ High Precision Freeware Desktop Calculator

SpeQ

SpeQ is a mathematical software which uses a sheet (or tape) just like the two we have mentioned before. But unlike them, SpeQ offers a library of computational functions. You can define your own variables and use them in your functions. The software has 100 pre-loaded constants plus 130 built-in units. You can plot graphs and trace the plotted functions. The memory list helps to reuse all previously defined functions and variables. You can add in your comments in the sheet, save it, and also print it out.

SpeQ (ver.3.4) is a 520 KB portable download. Installer is also available. It is supported on Windows (all).

SpaceTime

SpaceTime goes beyond the idea of just a free calculator and falls into the category of an advanced scientific application for power users. There are interactive tutorials which help you to start off with the app. SpaceTime has support for 2D and 3D graphing features. The scientific calculator has a large catalog of functions. The mathematical software covers algebra, computer algebra system (CAS), trigonometry, statistics (scatter plots, probability plots, histograms etc), and calculus among other capabilities. You can also enter your own scripts for solving loops, recursion and generating functions. Ultimately, you can capture screens, frames and results with a click.

SpaceTime (ver.4.0) is a 1MB download. It is supported on Windows (2000, XP, Vista, and 7) and Mac OS X. SpaceTime can also be downloaded for the iPhone and the iPad (not free). SpaceTime requires an obligatory free registration for use.

The five calculators cover the breadth from simplicity to complexity. The one you pick will depend on the level of calculations you need to perform. What’s your view on the above five? Which is your favorite calculator app?

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Today, if you’re an engineering or a science student and you want a useful and fast math computer program that can solve complicated math or algebraic equations in just seconds, you have a whole plethora of options on the Internet.

One of the best free applications that I discovered for this purpose is called Deadline. Need to calculate derivatives, integrals or the roots of an equation? Not a problem. Want to save the resulting graph to a report or a document filled with your homework solutions? It’s easy, just run Deadline and you can generate, manipulate and save any graph and the resulting mathematical solutions.

Solve Equations & Math Problems

When you first start the Deadline Wizard, you’ll have an opportunity to type in your equation, enter all of the equation parameters, and also type in the x-axis interval (the range of values that will be used in the formula to generate the graph of results).

When you click OK, you’ll instantly see a plot of your entire graph. In the top right field, you can modify whatever parameters you used in the equation on the first screen. This is useful because you can graphically see how changing each parameter changes your entire set of results. In this example, increasing “m” shifts the entire graph up.

You can also click on the roots (where the formula solution is zero), and you’ll see those roots represented in the graph as large green dots. You can also change the resolution of the graph by reducing or increasing the number of “points” used in the generation of the graph. Obviously, 1000 points will create a nice and smooth graph, but you can decrease it down to only 10 points to see how this affects results.

Working With Mathematical Solutions For Your Formulas

The nice thing about Deadline is that it doesn’t just graph results. You can actively change the formula or parameters as part of the graphic process. When you click Calculate -> Evaluate from the menu, you’ll see the three derivative results (f, f’ and f”) for each value of x that you’d like to test.

If you’re familiar with derivatives, you can select Calculate -> Derive to view the differential equations based on your original formula. This may not be useful for basic math problems, but for students working on advanced calculus or engineering problems, this can be extremely useful.

Even more useful to engineers and scientists is the ability to calculate and view the integrals for your equation. The integral is basically the amount of area between your graph of results and the x axis of the chart. Knowing this total area for a certain range is very valuable information, and this graphic software offers that answer with just a few keystrokes.

Under the “Calculate” menu item, you’ll also see the “find Extrema” tool, which gives you the peaks (extrema) of the graph in the range that you’ve displayed.

When you’re finished tweaking the chart with the parameters that you want, you can save the current graph to an image file (PNG format). This is obviously very useful for inserting the graph results in reports or homework solutions that you may be working on. In this format, you could also insert the graphs directly into a website or online posting.

DeadLine also comes with a built in “calculator” for those complicated math problems that have no variables. This is great for complex math problems that you just can’t do in your head.  Do you have 20 apples that you sell for 10 dollars each and want to divide among 4 friends and their 2 siblings? Just kick open the calculator and type “(20*10)/(4*2)” and you’re done.  No matter how complicated the problem, the calculator will always pull through.

As you type in each equation, the equation and resulting solution gets logged in the top window. I find the Deadline graphic and math calculator to be one of the most useful and functional math computer programs that I’ve discovered so far.

I would love to hear what you think of it, and whether you know of any other similar, or more useful and fast math computer programs that get the job done just as well.

Image Credit: Kim André Silkebækken

What are the potential uses of the iPhone? There is just so much that the iPhone can do for you, that we couldn’t fit all of it into one article. In this first part, we’re going to take a look how you can use your phone to stay fit, to avoid a speeding ticket or even how to turn your phone into your very own personal shopper.

Radar Detector

Trapster [iTunes link] is an app that depends entirely on user contributions. When a user spots a speed trap, they report it by tapping the map as they pass by. Other users are alerted as they approach it, and can confirm the trap’s location by tapping the map as well. It could be anything from a red light camera to a live police trap. The app also alerts users to road hazards including construction zones, flooded roads and more.

To avoid inaccurate information, all traps are voted on by other users, and if they are not voted on, they will automatically be removed. You can also configure Trapster to receive push notifications, so you don’t always need to keep the app open to benefit from the alerts.

The app is incredibly feature rich, allowing you to check for speed traps nearby, choose from a wide variety of sound themes and languages, listen to your iPod music while the app is open, and can even be used as an alternative to the native Maps application to get directions.

A variety of added useful locations can be displayed on your Trapster map including parking lots, gas stations and ATM machines.

Sports Trainer

We wouldn’t recommend cancelling your gym subscription, but the iPhone can sometimes come in handy when you need to get a workout, and with 321Run Free [iTunes link] you can turn your iPhone into your own personal trainer.

You can use the app to log all of the details about your runs, including how far you’ve run, how long it took you, and using the iPhone’s GPS feature, the exact place where you were running. But 321Run Free does more than just log your progress. The app features a variety of suggested programs tailored to suit various goals such as burning a certain number of calories, reaching the ability to run for 30 minutes straight, or if you’re training for a marathon to run for up to 2 hours straight.

You can listen to the music on your iPhone while using the app, connect to your Twitter account if you want to share your progress, and have the option of your “˜Coach’ alerting you as you reach your milestones, or when you tap the screen, to let you know how far along you’ve come.

Personal Shopper

The free iPhone Amazon app [iTunes link] offers users a unique timesaving feature called Amazon Remembers. As if it couldn’t get any easier making purchases on the go using your iPhone, Amazon aims to make it even easier for you.

If you can’t find an item that you’re looking for, snap a picture of it using your iPhone camera, and the photo will automatically be sent to Amazon for them to search for a similar product. Within a few minutes Amazon will send you a suggested listing closest to your image, notifying you by email when they do.

You can also turn your phone into a comparison shopper, using SnapTell. Take a photo of a CD, book or video game, and SnapTell will display all the online prices available for that product.

Newsstand

You can turn your iPhone into a newsstand with Zinio [iTunes link]. While the app itself is free ““ of course not all the magazines available are free, but you can snag a couple of issues and samples here and there for free, including the Reader’s Digest Humor Issue.

Magazines can be browsed by category, by top sellers, and new arrivals. You can then choose to purchase a year’s subscription, or purchase just one issue.

Flashlight

The free Flashlight [iTunes link] app turns your iPhone into a torch by opening up to a bright white screen. You can customise the appearance of the flashlight, choosing between a variety of colours, and can switch between them by swiping your finger across the screen. You can even create your own custom colours.

Double-tapping anywhere on the screen takes you into the settings where you can choose which colour to automatically open the app on, and how long to wait before turning off the display ““ starting at 5 minutes.

Spirit Level

iHandy Level [iTunes link] is a free Spirit Level app that can indicate whether a surface is level. The app can be used when you’re hanging up pictures and want to make sure they’re hung on the wall straight.

The app is very straightforward to use ““ simply lay it against the flat surface, in either landscape or portrait mode, and the app will let you know if it’s level or not.

FTP Server

You can turn your iPhone into a small portable FTP server using the free version of Wifi FTP [iTunes link]. After installing the app on your phone, open it up, making sure that you’re connected to a WiFi connection.

Turning the server on allows you to access the iPhone FTP server using any FTP client of your choice. Simply connect anonymously using the IP address provided in the app, using the FTP client of your choice, such as the popular Filezilla. If you’re a Mac user, check out this list of 8 choices for a few alternatives.

Not only can you use an FTP server to save your files, you can also edit .txt and .csv files on your iPhone, and upload them to Google Documents or email them as attachments.

Tip Calculator

It might not be particularly difficult to use your iPhone’s calculator to figure out how much you should leave for a tip when you’re done at a restaurant. But when you have an app like Tip and Split [iTunes link] to make life easier, why not use it?

Tip and Split allows you to calculate a tip anywhere up to 30% of the amount of your bill. Unlike other free tip calculators, it also allows you to split the total, tip included, between you and up to 19 other people. The app works only in landscape mode.

A few other potential uses of the iPhone that have already been covered on MakeUseOf include turning your iPhone into a remote, into the ultimate radio, the perfect GPS unit, and a Walkie-Talkie. In the next part of this article, we’ll show you how to turn your iPhone into a security monitor, an e-reader, and your own personal tutor.

But why stop there? Your web browser can function perfectly well for making basic calculations, and you don’t even need to install any plugins. There are a variety of online calculators out there, but I prefer to just use Google as a calculator.

Why? Because for what I need to calculate day-to-day it works. That and, since Google is my homepage and almost every browser builds in easy access to Google’s search functions, it’s almost always on hand.

Basic calculations

Getting started with Google as a calculator is easy: just type in what you want to calculate. If you’re stupid, for example, and don’t know what one plus one is, a quick search for 1 + 1 will give you the result.

This is a really simple example, of course: the calculator can do more than addition. Subtraction (1-1), Multiplication (1*1), and division (1/1) are all simple, as are exponents (5^6). A complete list of the functions Google’s calculator can use can be found here, and includes advanced functions including square root (sqrt(110)) and percentage (5% of 300).

As with any good calculator, parenthesis can be used if you want a certain part of a calculation to be completed first. This allows you to construct complex equations if you like, but you might find that really complex stuff is best left to actual calculators. Still, if you want to dive into the Google Calculator as deep as you can, I highly recommend GoogleGuide’s calculator page for more information.

Conversion

But Google calculator isn’t just useful in the ways a traditional calculator is; it goes beyond that, allowing you to convert between any two units just by typing a simple sentence. For example, I live in Boulder, Colorado now but used to live in Peace River, Alberta. Driving to Peace River from here is almost 1,600 miles. I could inform a Canadian friend of mine of this number, but seeing as everyone uses kilometers in Canada it probably wouldn’t mean much to them. No problem, I can do a quick conversion with Google.

Conversion isn’t limited to units of distance: you can convert Fahrenheit to Celsius (80 degrees Fahrenheit to Celsius), find out how many tablespoons are in half a cup (tablespoons in half cup) or silly things like how many bakers dozens there are in a score.

You can even convert units that change over time, like currency. If I were planning a trip to Peace River, I could use the conversion tool to figure out how many Canadian dollars I could buy with 500 American.

(Looks like the American dollar is a lot weaker than it was during my move. I should have held on to my Canadian currency”¦)

Other Nifty Features

If this is the first you’ve heard about using Google’s search function for anything besides”¦well”¦search, you’ll be interested to know that using Google as a calculator is just the tip of the iceberg. Google can quickly find local weather reports, information on packages and even the scores to live sporting events””all by typing a single search. Read all about it in Charnita’s article about 9 cool Google search shortcuts.

Conclusion

Google’s mostly known for its search engine, and rightly so: its widely thought to be the best on the planet. But building a calculator into the search bar means I can crunch basic numbers and conversions right from my search bar or home page. I use this on a daily basis.

What do you guys think? Is this a useful feature for Google to have, or would you never use a search engine to crunch numbers? Do you prefer another search engine to Google, and want to discuss its merits over Google (whilst possibly insulting me for not mentioning them?) Well, we have comments, so you’re free to say what you like!

For keeping tabs on numbers and crunching them though, it’s destination Excel for me. The second way is of course to use a calculator. But feeding in the numbers and tapping the keys is so much work.

The Excel way is way easier. All we have to do is type in the numbers and presto, the calculations are done for us and displayed in the status bar.

This feature is immensely helpful when you are working with a column of numbers as tall as the Eiffel Tower. The only effort that’s required is to select the column of numbers. In the early days, I used to head towards my neighborly Excel program to do the math. Though it’s a short journey, copy-pasting is still a job.

It turns out that all this while there’s a Word calculations tool for the job. Hidden under the layers of customizable commands is the Calculate tool.

The Calculate tool helps a lot when we have to work on a lot of numbers. It also lets us copy the result to the clipboard and paste it anywhere else.

Locate Calculate

By default the Calculate command is not on the Ribbon but following a few simple steps, it can be easily brought to the fore. Here it is”¦

1. Click on the Office Button and then click Word Options to open up the options box. Next, click on Customize.



2. On the right hand pane, under Choose commands from, drop down and select All Commands.



3. Scroll down the list of commands and select Calculate. Click on Add to include it on the Quick Access Toolbar.

Working With Calculate

• The Calculate icon becomes active (green) when you select the numbers for the computation. Select the row/column of numbers and click on the icon. The result is displayed briefly in the status bar. The result is also automatically copied to the clipboard and can be pasted in any application.



• The Calculate operation works with six operators ““
  1. Addition: 2+2
  2. Subtraction: 2-2 or 2(2)
  3. Multiplication: 2*2
  4. Division: 2/2
  5. Percentage: 100*10%
  6. Exponentiation and roots: 2^2 and 4^1/2
• If you select a series of numbers without an explicit addition operator, by default the Calculate command will add them up and display the sum. For instance, adding immediate rows or column of figures.



• The Calculate command ignores any text that’s not a number. Exceptions are currency symbols, periods and commas, which it considers when they are a part of a number. For instance,3 bags full, 1 for the master, 1 for the dame and 1 for the little boy who lives down the lane.“¦will give 6 as the result.
• MS Word 2007 rounds off results to two decimal places. Note: This can be changed from Control Panel ““ Regional and Language Options ““ Regional Options ““ Customize Regional Options ““ No. of digits after decimal.



Remember, this changes the settings across all Windows programs. So, you can just consider using a multiplier instead.

• The Calculate command takes into account the currency symbol as set in the Regional Settings. For instance, $50-25 will give $25 and not 25.

The Sum Of The Result

The simplicity of the Calculate command makes it a better command to have than the complexity of creating a table and building a formula (using the Formula command under Layout) to complete Word calculations. The latter is more like an elephant gun, when I would rather like to have a mosquito swatter.

Windows also has a calculator built in and you can copy and paste its results in any Windows program. But for simple Word calculations in lesser clicks, the Calculate command is way more helpful.

Read some more about the Calculate command and its guidelines in this post at the unofficial Microsoft Most Valued Professional site.

What do you think about this simple but useful tool for MS Word (Word 2007 and 2003)? Do you think it helps to reduce the Excel effect?

Image: josef.stuefer