56 MAXIMUMPC FEBRUARY 2007
how (^2) IMPROVING YOUR PC EXPERIENCE, ONE STEP AT A TIME
CALCULATOR
AND
CONVERTER
Here are some examples
of conversions that Google
will understand—type them
into the normal search box:
currency of France in
Malaysian money
400 yen in U.S. dollars
12 pounds in kilos
Google won’t just help you “write” that book report, it
will also help with your math homework.
Google Books is an amazing resource.
The Google Books project seeks to
get as much book content online as is
allowed by copyright law and make it
searchable. Books that are out of copy-
right are viewable in full, and varying
amounts of other books can be viewed.
Go to http://books.google.com and
click Advanced Search. From this page
you can specify whether your search
terms refer to the title, author, or main
text of a book. It’s often possible to view
a surprisingly large portion of a book
that’s still under copyright, but you need
to have a Google account to do so. You
might get to leaf through just the fi rst
few pages of a text by using the Arrow
buttons, but you can see much more of
a text by using the Search in This Book
box. Click the Table of Contents or Index
links next to the page to see what’s in the
book and then do a search for the part
you want to read. Many books can be
downloaded as a PDF for reading offl ine.
Google Books
Don’t just search for books, search inside books. All of them.
Want to know how much that Japanese eBay auction
is going to cost you? Use Google!
The search box also works as a
calculator. Use the normal oper-
ators on the numeric keypad for
simple math and the following
operators for more complicated
sums:
Parentheses ( ): Anything put
inside parentheses will be cal-
culated fi rst.
^ : This symbol raises the
preceding number to the power
of the number following it. For
example, write three squared
as 3^2.
log, ln, sin, cos: All under-
stood, use as normal.
% of: The percentage sign
by itself provides the modulo
(the remainder after division),
so be sure to use “% of” if you
want a percentage. For exam-
ple, “20% of 300.”