Do math in Spotlight

When Napoleon Dynamite went on about mad skills, he wasn’t referring to my math abilities. They approach null space pretty damn quickly. I blame my grade six teacher for letting me use a calculator (I mean, who the hell does that with young kids). Anyway, my confidence in my math skills vary, and I’m constantly re-checking my results against Spotlight. Yup, you’ve heard me right, Spotlight.

You might not be aware of this, but spotlight has a built in calculator that lets you solve some simple (as well as complex) math problems. Don’t believe me? Try this out.

Open up spotlight and paste this into the search bar:

(9*2)^2

Did you get 324? Spotlight can do BEDMAS, which is pretty damn handy when you’re trying to do some quick analysis while crunching your site traffic numbers.

So the next time you need some quick calculations hit the CMD + Spacebar key combination, type in your math problem, and let spotlight solve it for you.

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld… Full Bio