Math in a Text Field…
God I love my Mac. Is there nothing it can’t do?
Cool tip from Mike Ash. Type a mathematical expression in any text field, select the expression, then type Shift-Command-8 and watch what happens. No way!!! Way!!!
Try that Mr. Windows!
– Dave
I tried that technique on my Windows PC …. flames shot out of the vents, smoke came from the keyboard, than a picture of Bill G appeard on the monitor, looking very much like the Wicked Witch of the West melting into a pool of goo!
Hmmmm … wonder if that’s covered by my warranty?
One of the funniest comments EVER!!!!
– Dave
what happens? I tried it on my mac, in the url field of a browser window and on a sticky in Stickies and the only thing that happened was Script Editor opened up – could this be a developer environment thing and not for regular end-users?
Try in Safari’s Google field. That definitely works for me. Also TextEdit. So far, very few places where it didn’t work, and almost all of those were controlled by MS.
Be sure you select the text.
– Dave
Doesn’t work for me in any text field – even tried Safari and Text Edit – all that happens, if I write “8+3=” and then highlight and do a shift-command-8, is that Script Editor launches. It might be OS version-biased (I don’t have the latest Leopard installed, still on 10.5.3)… otherwise, I don’t know what I’m missing, and I wanna sit at the cool kids’ table.
ahhhh… it’s the = sign that was gumming me up – you said “mathematical expression” and I thought that included the = sign. My mistake. Now I see that if I type 8+3 and the select it and do a command-shift-8, I get the text replaced with 11. It doesn’t work in all text fields, like this comment field, but it works in most. Additionally, if in Firefox and you type a mathematical expression, it suggests the answer on the fly – so 8+3 gets suggested as 11, but if I type -1, 10 is suggested automagically. Cool stuff! Thank you!!!
also, I learned that google does a host of math in its search field – among others:
^ for exponential (x to the power of y)
% for modulo (to find the remainder after division)
th root of creates the nth root of a number
% of finds percentages X % of Y finds X percent of Y.
sqrt finds the square root of the number that follows
ln logarithm base e
log logarithm base 10