Section 7.16. Accessories: All Versions

7.16. Accessories: All Versions

The programs in this suite have two things in common. First, they're all smallish, single-purpose programs (or just links to them) that you'll probably use only occasionally. Second, you get to them from the Start All Programs Accessories menu.

7.16.1. Calculator

At first glance, this calculator looks like nothing more than a thinner version of every pocket calculator you've ever seen (Figure 7-9). You can operate it either by clicking the buttons with your mouse or by pressing the corresponding keys on your keyboard.

Figure 7-9. After ducking into a phone booth , the humble Calculator (lower right) emerges as Scientific Calculator (upper left), which contains a hexadecimal/decimal/octal/binary converter for programmers, mathematical functions for scientists, and enough other buttons to impress almost anyone .

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Tip: Choosing View Digit Grouping instructs the Calculator to display numbers with commas (123,456,789), making large numbers (123456789) a lot easier to read.Most of the buttons look just like the ones on the plastic calculator thats probably in your desk drawer at this very moment, but several require special explanation:

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• /. The slash means "divided by" in computerese.

• *. The asterisk is the multiplication symbol.

• sqrt . Click this button to find the square root of the currently displayed number.

• %. Type in one number, click the * button, type a second number, and then click this button to calculate what percentage the first number is of the second.

  FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
  Clipboard Viewer

  Hey, what happened to the Clipboard Viewer? It used to be in the System Tools group of my Start Programs Accessories menu, and now its gone .

  Yes, Clipboard Viewer was a cool little program for seeing the material you'd most recently copied .

  It's gone. You can't even use the Run command to issue the Clipbrd.exe command any more.

  Fortunately, the shareware world is ready to step into the breach. Take a look, for example, at AccelClip (available, among other places, from this book's "Missing CD" page at www.missingmanuals.com).

  
  

• 1/x . Here's a Ratio button. It makes the currently displayed number appear as the denominator of a fraction. That is, it turns "4" into