Introduction; The Home View - HP 39gs Quick Start Manual

1 Getting Started

Introduction

The HP 39gs Graphing Calculator is an easy to use, yet powerful graphing calculator designed for secondary mathematics education and beyond. This
quick start guide covers basic tasks, such as entering and editing expressions, plotting graphs, and making tables of values. This guide also serves as an
introduction to more advanced tasks, like working with lists or matrices. It is highly recommended you refer to the HP 39gs Graphing Calculator User's
Guide on the product CD for more information about any topic presented in this guide, and Mastering the hp 39gs & hp 40gs located at www.hp.com/
calculators to thoroughly familiarize yourself with the many features of your new calculator. This manual makes use of certain conventions with text to dif-
ferentiate between key presses and on screen display options:
• Keyboard keys are represented by CAPITAL letters.
• SHIFT, when followed by CAPITAL letters and (CAPITALS), indicates the shifted functions of the keyboard keys printed in gray above the keys
• Menu items for menu keys are also spelled out in CAPITAL letters, followed by the term, menu key
• Field names, choose box options, and other on screen text appear in BOLD
• Numbered keys are represented simply by printed numbers: 1, 5, 123.35, etc.

The Home View

Press the ON key on the keyboard to access the Home view. The HP 39gs Home view is divided into four parts, from top to bottom. There is a Header at
the top, with the name of the Aplet you're currently using and whether you are in degree (DEG) or radian (RAD) mode. Next comes the History of calcula-
tions. Below that is the Entry Line. Finally, at the bottom is the Menu for the menu keys. The top row of keys on the HP 39gs keyboard has no labels. These
are the context-sensitive menu keys. These keys take their functionality from the list of functions printed at the bottom of the display, which changes as you
use the various features of the calculator. There are six menu keys in all. See Figure 1 for an illustration of these parts of the Home view.
Figure 1 The Home View
Getting Started 1