Caculator on Tool Bar (MS OFFICE 2000)

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I discovered how to put a calculator on my tool bar in Excel. This was wonderful, it is like the windows calculator. Now I would love to have the same thing on
my MS Word Tool Bar … ? I tried for about 1.5 hours all kinds of things to import the calculator, to move the one from Excel to the desktop and then into Word, nothing I tried worked, any help out there … ?

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Word has a wimpy calculate button that works like this: Type 2+2 then select the sum then click the calculate button. The status bar will tell you the answer is 4. You probably want something a bit more powerful, so I won’t even tell you how to put the “ToolsCalculate” button on your toolbar.

Instead, put the following little snippet in a Normal.dot code module and add a button for it on your toolbar of choice via Tools>Customize>Commands>Macros.

Sub ToolsCalculator()
Dim ret As Variant
ret = Shell(“calc.exe”, vbNormalFocus)
End Sub

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Very nice!

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That is really useful – thanks. Word even has a cute little calculator button just for the toolbar!

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I like that sig; looks great on the white background of the email message. If I ever retire Kevin McCalister, I think I’ll do a sig.

Glad you found the code useful.

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Well Kevin, everyone seems happy, but I am still no where, I have no idea what you ment by the snipit or whatever it is called, and now my question is cluttered by all this other feedback which is of no help to me, all
I am doing is spending a bunch of time reading comments …? this has not helped me a bit …

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Kevin’s message has one answer, but if you are not the VBA type, it’s probably not worth your time. Consider this alternative method: if you are using Windows 98 or ME, put the calculator icon on the QuickLaunch bar. This would not require any macro programming, it would be accessible from everywhere, and it’s easily done on other PCs you might be forced to visit during the course of your week.

Technique:

(1) Make space on your QuickLaunch bar
(2) Flip open the start menu to Programs, Accessories
(3) Right click and drag on the Calculator icon to the QuickLaunch bar and position the black insertion point where you want the new icon
(4) Release and choose Copy from the pop-up menu to create your icon

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RJB,

Well no need to be snippy . I cut out those snippets every now and then too.

Here’s a partial solution that may give you what you want and more. It’s not a perfect solution (but pretty close) but maybe the people on the lounge smarter than me can improve on it. That leaves it open to almost every one.

First, one of the things that I didn’t see mentioned in any of the responses mentioning the Tools Calculate command is that the answer is also stored in the clipboard. So you can paste the answer next to your equation without having to copy the answer. Helps when you’re trying to compute the value of pi and don’t want to miss the 98th digit. But I didn’t discover this on my own. It came from the lounge somewhere. Told you there were lots of smart people here. But I know this is not what you want.

Now to my partial solution: Go to the web.

When using Word’s customize capability, you can put a button corresponding to 1 of several Web commands onto your toolbar. However, you don’t even have to do this much. If you open the Web toolbar (and I know that some people hate this; I’m one of them but this trick might change my mind), you’ll see a couple of buttons that are of use. Alternatively, you can drag the button from the Web commands onto one of your existing toolbars that’s always open (like the Formatting or Std toolbar or Menu bar).

The buttons I’m talking about are
– Favorites
– Open Favorites

To a degree, these do roughly the same. The latter opens your Favorites folder (like an open dialog) while the latter just has a drop-down with your Favorites, including sub-menu items for sub-folders within Favorites.

Now all you have to do is stick a short-cut for calc.exe into the Favorites folder and you’re done – almost. You might even want to get organized and create a subfolder for Programs and put in shortcuts for all the programs you’d want to open from within word, excel, powerpoint…

On my PC (running Win 98, Ofc 97 and IE 5.0), I get a msg box that says “some files may contain viruses…”. This is the part where some help might be useful – to avoid this msg box. But click OK. Voila – calc opens up. I don’t think any virus writers have written viruses to infect calc.exe.

You can also do the above in 1 step more but why? There is another web command to Open an object at an address. Put this on your toolbar. There is also a command for Go, which presents a menu with Open as its first choice. Either way, you get an open dialog with an empty text box asking for an “Address”. Type the path for calc (usually something like C:windowscalc.exe) (or just browse to the file) and press OK. You then get the virus warning per above. Proceed as above.

I think the last para above is a waste but just wanted to be complete. Another problem with it is that the file is not sticky. When you click open again, you have a blank text box. However, all of your things that you opened are in the drop-down for the Address box. But this may not last forever as you open other things on the web.

The Favorites approach is a no-brainer.

If you don’t have IE loaded, this is totally worthless. If you do, I hope this helps a little.

I can almost talk myself into believing Bill’s argument that IE is part of the operating system. Almost.

By the way, how do you get that button for calc.exe onto your Excel toolbar. I think I saw a post on the excel lounge for how to do this, but I forgot.

Fred

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Richard,

Well, you do have to make a small effort to put that code into a Normal.dot module. Is that the part you are having trouble with? If you want to try that with some more instructions, I’d be glad to walk you through the steps. Let me know. Better yet, see BAM’s post just below. She lays it out very clearly.

I like Jefferson’s, idea too. If you just drag and drop the calculator to the Quicklaunch bar (to the right of the Windows Start button), you’ll have a calc button for every program.

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You didn’t read the top post, did you?

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Azokay. I hope the “acne” clears up soon.

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I do not want to calculate, but I want the calculator like
the one with windows, which can switch from Scientific to standard an back. In Excel you can put this icon on the tool bar…..

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You know, nobody’s mentioned it yet, but there’s a handy dandy calculator for Word in Wopr. At least there was in Wopr 97. Could someone point Richard to a web page where he can learn about the Wopr tools? You could just start at the top, I guess: http://www.wopr.com

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I went to the WOPR location, but did not see a way to
search for the caculator, nor did I see any info on a calcualtor.

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It’s a part of the Wopr97 package, not a separate program. Download Wopr97 and install it.

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The macro posted elsewhere in this thread by Kevin invokes a calculator which is the same one we get in Excel. In that calculator application, there is a View Menu which allows switching between scientific and normal calculator views.

Cheers!

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