The Address Bar Is Also a Calculator

How many times a day do you need to quickly work something out — add sales tax, split a bill three ways, convert a percentage? Most people open the Calculator app for this, or reach for their phone. Yet you already have a calculator in front of you at all times: the browser's address bar. Just type the expression into it and the result appears right in the suggestions, before you even hit Enter. No switching windows, no hunting for an app.

How to do it

1. Click into the address bar (or summon it with Ctrl + L, on a Mac Cmd + L).
2. Type the calculation, say 12500*1.21 or (89+134+56)/3. Write decimals with a period — the address bar expects that, not a comma.
3. The result shows up immediately in the expanded suggestions below the bar. In Chrome and Edge you see it right away as the first suggestion, no clicking required. Firefox has had a built-in calculator since version 137 and shows the result the same way.
4. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, parentheses, and exponents (2^10) all work. Just read the result and press Esc — there's no reason to hit Enter unless you want to jump into a search.
5. In Chrome with Google as the default search engine, the suggestions can even handle unit and currency conversions: type 100 eur to usd or 5 km to miles and the answer shows up among the suggestions. Pressing Enter opens a full calculator or converter in the search results.

A typical scenario

You're invoicing a client and need to know what $18,500 plus 21% tax comes to. The usual routine: Alt+Tab to the desktop, search for Calculator in the Start menu, punch in the numbers, switch back to the browser. Or worse — doing it in your head and making a typo that ends up on the invoice.

With the address bar it's one motion: Ctrl+L, type 18500*1.21, read the result 22,385 from the suggestions, Esc, and get back to work. The whole thing takes three seconds and you never leave the window you're working in. You can just as quickly split a bill between roommates, work out a per-unit price, or figure out how many percentage points you need for an A.

What you get out of it

Small calculations stop interrupting your work — you don't need to leave the browser or hunt for a calculator. You'll save a few minutes a day at a rough guess, but more importantly a lot of micro-interruptions, after which people return to what they were doing worse than they'd expect.

Pro tip

When you need to paste the result somewhere else, you don't have to retype it: in Chrome, just click the suggestion with the result and the browser offers it up for copying. And if you calculate on a Mac outside the browser, Spotlight does the same trick — the principle of "type the expression wherever you already are" works across systems.