calculator

You have 55 days to file a form: what day is your deadline? A bill is due on the first of June: how many days do you have? With Date Calculator from SJW Computer Resources, you'd know in a few clicks. It's a free tool that calculates the difference between two dates, or what day it was or will be on a certain date.

Date Calculator is portable freeware that requires no installation and can be run from a variety of locations, but it does come zipped. However, it remembers its screen position when you close it and … Read more

Annuities are a popular way to invest your money, especially if you're risk-averse and like the security of having a guaranteed income from your investments. Annuity Calculator for Excel is a simple Excel workbook that can help you determine exactly what you can expect your annuity income to look like.

Annuity Calculator for Excel comes as an XLS file and requires no installation; all you have to do is open it in Excel. Far from being just a spreadsheet full of numbers, the calculator has an attractive layout and enough explanatory text to give even beginners an idea of … Read more

Home Mortgage Calculator from Vertex42 is a free Excel spreadsheet template for calculating fixed and variable rate home mortgages. That sounds useful but not very exciting, which is a fairly good description of Excel spreadsheets in general. However, Home Mortgage Calculator is more than just a page full of tables. It incorporates many automated features and options, but better still, its clear explanations, numerous examples, and graphical displays make it easy not only to calculate mortgage rates but also get a better overview of your mortgage. To use Home Mortgage Calculator, you will need Microsoft Excel 2002 or above.

We … Read more

Microsoft tweaked its Office Web Apps earlier this week with a few enhancements designed to make Excel and PowerPoint a bit more user friendly.

Excel aficionados can now insert, delete, and rename individual worksheets in a workbook, just like you can in the desktop version. To do this, open your Excel file in the online editor. Then simply right-click on a tab for an existing worksheet. You'll see the three familiar options to Insert, Delete, or Rename. Inserting adds a new worksheet in front of your current selection. Deleting asking for your confirmation to permanently get rid of the … Read more

It's almost like a "Wizard of Oz" moment for Texas Instruments, which is opening the door to color displays on its popular calculators.

Next month, the semiconductor and educational technology giant is launching the $165 TI-Nspire CX handheld, its thinnest and lightest graphing calculator ever. The specs completely blow away the TI-84 that I used in college.

Thankfully, TI has moved away from the monochromatic screen of yesteryear and boasts that the CX has a 3.2-inch 16-bit color LCD (320x240) with a respectable 125 DPI. TI also bumped up the memory in the CX series compared to previous TI-Nspire models with 100MB of onboard storage and 64MB of RAM. I can imagine hackers are already salivating to get Doom and Game Boy Color emulators running on this thing as soon as possible.

Of course, the real strength of a TI calculator is its ability to handle higher-level mathematic concepts. The TI-Nspire CX is designed for pre-algebra, algebra 1 and 2, trigonometry, geometry, pre-calculus, statistics, business and finance, biology, physics, chemistry, and calculus classes.

An alternate Computer Algebra System (CAS) model is also available and is approved for standardized testing, such as the SAT, PSAT/NMSQT, ACT, AP, IB, and Praxis exams. I wonder if it can calculate how many commas were in my last two sentences. … Read more

A carbon footprint measures the amount of greenhouse gases that we put out into the atmosphere via transportation, electricity use, and other daily activities. Carbon Footprint Calculator is a Google Desktop Gadget that lets users easily tabulate their carbon footprints, as well as the number of trees that would need to be planted in order to offset it.

The program appears as an attractive rectangle within Google Desktop. The gadget's text invites users to calculate their carbon footprint by clicking on the word Start, and it then walks users through a series of questions about their energy consumption. Users … Read more

SA Calculator is a portable freeware calculator with some business-oriented extras, such as transaction tape support, exporting to text and Excel, and the ability to quickly calculate the time between two dates. It's from Sigil Advertising, which is based in Dubai. What's the connection? Shipping: Dubai is one of the oldest and busiest ports in the world, and SA Calculator is just the tool for calculating shipping schedules, arrival and departure dates, and transit times.

SA Calculator requires no installation, which means you can keep it on a USB drive or portable devices and run it on any … Read more

What's better than one great deal? Three great deals, of course! Now that I'm all rested up after the long weekend, I bring you this money-saving threesome:

1. Today only, a deal-of-the-day outfit called PricePlunge has an 8GB Dane-Elec flash drive for $7.99, plus 99 cents for shipping. Compatible with Windows and Mac systems, the drive is capless and retractable, two features I quite like. Plus, it comes with a five-year warranty. I should note that I've never purchased anything from PricePlunge, so I can't vouch for the reliability of the company. (If you can, … Read more

The Spotlight menu in OS X is an exceptionally useful feature for quickly finding documents by either file name or by content, but in addition it can be used as a launcher for applications and a way to quickly find Web pages you recently visited or items in your e-mail accounts, and in Leopard and Snow Leopard can be used to perform simple calculations. While for the most part the calculations work, sometimes there are odd behaviors that can give strange results.

For instance, if you take a number and divide it by a second number, then multiply the result … Read more