Interchanging The Period And Comma In Numbers; Scientific Notation - HP -18C Owner's Manual

Interchanging the Period and Comma in
Numbers
To change the decimal point and digit separator:
1.
Press
I
OISP
I
to display the
DISP
menu.
2. Specify the decimal point by pressing
_ or _ . _
sets a period as the decimal point and comma as the digit sepa-
rator. For example, the number one million is displayed as
1,000,000.00. _ sets a comma as the decimal point and pe-
riod as the digit separator. For example, the number one million
is displayed as 1.000.000,00.
Scientific Notation
Scientific notation is useful when you are working with very large or
very small numbers. For example, the 1984 Gross National Product of
the United States was $3,662,800,000,000. Scientific notation writes
this number as a smaller number (called a mantissa) times 10 raised to
a power. In this case, the decimal point is moved 12 places to the left,
and the number is written as 3.6628 x 10
12 .
The same process is
used for very small numbers, except that the decimal point is moved
to the right, and 10 is raised to a negative power. For example,
0.00000752 can be written as 7.52
X
10-
6 .
When a calculation produces a result too large or too small for the
HP -18C to display, the number is automatically displayed in scientific
notation, using a capital E in place of "x IOU.
44 2: Arithmetic