Step Away From the Spreadsheet and Dig Donationware Gem OpalCalc - beckfign1986

At a Glance

Skilful's Rating

Pros

• Unique natural language support
• Innovative
• Built-in unit and currency converter

Cons

• Natural language can yield surprising results
• Can embody tricky to passe-partout

Our Finding of fact

OpalCalc is a unique calculator that lets you use earthy language for Clarence Shepard Day Jr.-to-twenty-four hour period calculations.

Spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice.org Calc are extremely powerful. That's majuscule for complicated fiscal and business-related calculations, but sometimes, I simply want to impart skyward a list of expenses operating theater the measurements for a home-improvement fancy…and I don't want to play with parentheses and colons to exercise it. For those cases, OpalCalc is just the ticket.

OpalCalc makes quick employment of day-to-day calculations, even if they include up-to-dateness conversions.

At first sight, OpalCalc looks like a notepad application. There are no rows, columns, or any of the another tralatitious spreadsheet interface elements. The resemblance to notepad is not complete: the text redaction expanse is vertically split. Publish your calculations on the left, and the magic happens on the right.

The idea behind OpalCalc is not entirely original, and the author credits several applications that provided inspiration, much as Console Calculator, Speq, and Soulver. Specifically, Soulver bears a striking resemblance to OpalCalc, just alas for Windows users, its most past versions are Mac and iOS only.

It is very easy to use OpalCalc for calculating the budget for an outing, for instance. Just begin itemization all of the expenses you desire to budget for, much like you would on a napkin: so-and-thus for breakfast, soh-and-sol for tickets, etc. As you tilt the items, you'll see the numbers game you've included in every telephone circuit extracted on the right. Once you're done listing all of the expense items, simply typecast the word "total" in a line of its own. OpalCalc will add up all the numbers and display the entire.

That is just scratching the surface of what OpalCalc can execute. The diligence features a inbuilt currency convertor, pulling live currency rates off the Net. Then, for example, if you have a list of prices in US dollars and want to know how much they all add up to in Canadian dollars, simply append the words "as CAD" to the line that says "total".

OpalCalc lets you set up your own variables: for example, you could have a variable called "CostPerPerson" (no spaces are allowed in variable names). Then, if you have 5 people in your political party, you buns simply drop a line something like "5 * CostPerPerson", and instantly see the result on the right. You can also set in the lead your own functions (although if you find yourself needing those, possibly it's time for a really spreadsheet).

Such like a spreadsheet, all calculations in OpalCalc are dynamic and instant. As you variety a single number in your written document, complete other numbers affected away it will instantly update to reflect the change. This makes IT very easy to play with the numbers and tone at different scenarios.

OpalCalc comes in handy for home improvement projects, too: it features an extensive unit conversion system, and understands both Imperial and metric measurements. For example, you could utilization it to calculate the area of a board you'd the likes of to blusher, so divide IT by the coverage orbit of a single bucket of paint, and reproduce that by the cost of the bucket, ending up with the cost of paint for that room.

Since OpalCalc is so open-over, it is not without its quirks; Its earthy voice communication parser makes information technology easy to stupefy things legal injury. For example, the keyword it expects for currency conversion is "as". If you use the word "in", such as "5 USD in CAD", OpalCalc testament not translate. So, intuitive American Samoa it may seem at first, you may still come up yourself resorting to the online help and trying to memorize the sentence structure.

Some other unique aspect of OpalCalc is its pricing model. OpalCalc is donationware: You posterior try it free of charge with documents up to cardinal lines long, but if you wish to use it for longer documents, you need to donate. It's called a contribution, preferably than a fee, because you get at set your own terms. The OpalCalc website contains a textbox letting you enter any amount of money (in GBP or USA dollars). This can be American Samoa little as a few cents, although the developer recommends a donation of $5-$25.

For simple day-to-solar day use, OpalCalc feels more than spontaneous and "human" than Excel, at to the lowest degree for me. By being different and targeting a narrower use cause than traditional spreadsheets, OpalCalc has managed to carve itself a unambiguously priceless corner.

–Erez Zukerman

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/472602/opalcalc.html

Posted by: beckfign1986.blogspot.com

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