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Most of us have smartphones capable of doing advanced math. But no matter how sophisticated your apps are, your phone isn’t built to solve equations. Touchscreens and tiny keyboards just aren’t designed for high volumes of numerical transactions, especially when you get interrupted by a call or text. Here are four excellent calculators to help you do math quickly and efficiently in a variety of settings.
Large buttons: Casio SL-300SV Solar Powered Standard Function Calculator
Large buttons
Basic And Effective
Next time you’re at the bank or grocery store, pull this small calculator out of your bag or shirt pocket and forget everything you ever knew about long division. It’s just 4.6 inches long and 2.8 inches wide, which is a bit more than an inch shorter and slightly narrower than the iPhone 11. Calculate profit-margin and square root functions in addition to arithmetic basics, and view your results on an 8-digit display. It runs on solar power with a battery backup.
Great for bookkeepers: Sharp QS-2130 12-Digit Commercial Desktop Calculator
Great for bookkeepers
View Your Fractions
This impressive calculator is 6.9 inches long and 7.3 inches wide and has an LCD screen that displays up to a dozen digits. It’s perfect to keep at the office to total long strings of numbers, similar to an adding machine or printing calculator. Bookkeepers and accountants can speedily input data and choose to round numbers up or down. The large buttons make a sound when pressed to help ensure accuracy, and you can flip up a stand on the back to angle the screen toward you for convenience.
Great for students: EAI Texas Instruments TI-36X Pro Scientific Calculator
Great for students
A Step Up
If you’re studying math, a scientific calculator without graphing functions is more likely to be allowed in standardized testing. Study more than one calculation at a time with the MultiView display option on the TI-36X, and solve polynomials and systems of linear equations. Whether you’re learning algebra, calculus, or statistics, or applying it in biology, engineering, or computer science, this brick-sized tool will be a solid companion through years of hard work.
Most advanced: Texas Instruments TI-Nspire CX II CAS Color Graphing Calculator with Student Software
Most advanced
Best For Complex Problem-Solving
Visualize, analyze, and crunch your numbers using this color graphing calculator. From mapping points to writing basic code, even professional engineers may find it’s advanced functions useful to have around. Aspiring mathematicians and scientists of any age can learn how to master this model at their own pace with TI-Nspire™ CX Student Software, which is included with your purchase. The battery charges with a USB cable and can last up to two weeks in your locker or backpack before running out of power.
