Everybody loves a good Easter egg, and here’s a couple of oddities we found in the Windows calculator that we thought we’d share. How many of them did you already know about?
You’ll probably notice that some of these aren’t technically Easter eggs—in fact, one of them is a bug. But since they are indeed unexpected behavior, keep reading for the fun.
Grab a Slice of Windows Calculator Pie
Copy this word to the clipboard, and then paste it into the Calculator window (with Ctrl+V).
Fun!
Of course, this really doesn’t work the way you’d think—in fact, if you just hit the “p” key it’ll do the same thing, since that’s the accelerator key for the pi symbol.
Calculate Equations with the Clipboard
You can also use the clipboard trick to copy an equation into the calculator and process it. For instance, copy this to the clipboard:
Then paste it in with Ctrl+V.
The Square Root of 4, Less 2, Equals… –1.06?
This one is actually a bug, but it’s kinda entertaining. You can use this in the regular mode as well, so we’ll show that here—just type in 4, hit the square root button shown in the screenshot on the left-hand side, then subtract 2 from that.
And what you’ll see is this… weird.
Note: this article idea was inspired after somebody sent me this video.
Update: Looks like reader Debajyoti also sent in this idea the other day, which is indirectly how it came across to us. Thanks!
So…. do you know of any others?
