How Do I switch back to N. American Notation??

[raf]

How do I switch my HP 15C back to N. American notation?

It has suddenly started displaying numbers in the European format, like this:

1.000,0000 INSTEAD OF
1,000.0000

- Raf

[Patrick]

Hold down the decimal point key as you turn the unit on.

Not your fault, Raf, but this question is asked here (usually in the context of the HP-12C) every week or two, it seems.

To our esteemed Curator: Perhaps you should consider adding a FAQ section to the site in which answers to questions like this might be put. It could be nothing more than a clone of the articles page with a different header?

[Dave Hicks]

Like this? :-)

[Patrick]

Sorry, Dave. My bad.

I guess I've seen no references to it in several months of forum watching so I assumed wrongly that there wasn't one.

On the other hand (he says, furiously trying to recover some credibility), part of what I suggest is still valid. It would be good if there was a "contributors" section where new items could be added by members, like for the articles section.

[Dave Hicks]

Well besides the articles forum, a couple of people volunteered to somehow try to organize/FAQ-ize the forum and the archives.

I'll let them add something here if they haven't drowned due the volume of their task.

[Ellis Easley]

For my part, at first I thought I would just accumulate links to the posts I found while searching the archives. I was primarily interested in hardware repair tips. A file of such links relating to a specific model or family would constitute an FAQ. Doing this on a casual basis is one thing but going through the archives rigorously is another! Also, Dave believes that at the rate posts are accumulating, he might not be able to keep all the archives online forever, so the relevant information in archive posts needs to be copied to a new FAQ file. To me, this suggests the need for editorial judgment and that's where I get bogged down. But as Patrick pointed out, how to switch the Voyagers' radix mark is a truly frequently asked question, along with what batteries the Voyagers use and how to change the number of digits displayed by Voyagers, and I have to admit that I was not conscious of the fact that these questions are all answered in the Museum FAQ! From time to time I have had the pleasure of answering questions in the Forum by pointing to answers that are stored in the "other rooms" of the museum, and at those times it strikes me how much the Museum is like the Doctor's TARDIS - we were always learning about additional rooms (in the earlier shows, before the Doctor had to jettison a lot of them to save the TARDIS).

[Pierre Brial]

Hello,

What surprise me is that this kind of question has its answer in the manual and in HP FAQ webpages. Furthermore most (if not all) questions in HP FAQ has their answer in the manual.
People don't read manuals ?

All the best

Pierre

[Vieira, Luiz C. (Brazil)]

My turn;

hello, folks;

now from my part. I "talked" to both Ellis and Dave at the time this activity began, and I was one of the guys that much suggested this sort of reference source.

As a pilot-text, a reference for my own, I collected a lot of posts related to daily use of many calculators and began to order them for each family and then for each model in family, so I could "measure" and decide for the final type of text I should have. I was also tracking daily posts so I could add the newest information. Suddenly, in one fatidic day, after lots of hours under current activity, I got home and found a very interesting post about calculator use. I collect it, cleaned it up, and saved it. About 8Kbytes of data overwrote almost 8Mbytes of text and I did not see it. I was tired enough. And I did not realize that till I tried to open it again about a couple of days later, when the "trash bag" was cleaned at least three time. No traces of more than five months of dedicated work...

I'm just finishing some other activities for now and I'm getting back soon to these files, I promise. I remember that one of my concerns was about credits, and I would like to listen from others. What I actually did was to concentrate everything in one text about the same subject at first, then I refined this text and try to make it as simple and easy to read as I thought it could be (another concern: do I know English enough to do it the best way?). But later I thought about some sort of documentary with "interviews", I mean, keep contributor's original text. Then I cut and paste the text from each post with their author's credits. Later I saw that many people said the same thing with a different approach, so I so I joined these "speakers" in one single mentioning with their names. After that, I returned to the original format and finished the one-text-only with many credits at the end of it, but I still don't know the best way of organizing this sort of data. Unfortunately this final text is the one I trashed at once...

I take this kind of task as fun and enlightening, believe me. But I think it must be well done, as all posts in here have their quantity of judgement sense, heavy tech knowledge and wisdom, and in many cases the author's style, and these are characteristics that should never be purged from original posts. As an example that I keep in mind, see db(martinez, ca) posts. Like a few others, he writes everything in lower case, no matter what. This must be kept if cutting and pasting parts of his posts, but I cannot see a way to keep this "format" in an integral text. See what I mean?

Best regards.

Luiz (Brazil)

Edited: 28 Aug 2003, 10:35 a.m.

[Paul Brogger]

Google's "advanced search" seems to have links to the FAQ as well as to the Forum, and results may be limited by domain. So, one may search for "commas points" and only view results from www.hpmuseum.com . I do note that neither "commas dots" nor "commas periods" return a link to the FAQ, that some of the links are obsolete, and that some of the linked-to pages seem to be stripped of the MoHPC header (???) Is there a way to "force" (encourage) Google to re-index a particular domain? This might be a way to search across the Forum archives, which can be problematic.

[Paul Brogger]

Maybe the Museum's "search" link could be more prominently displayed (for newcomers) on the Museum's opening page. Searches for "commas dots", "commas periods" and "commas points" each returned a link to the FAQ (among other things).

I do, however, wonder whether many 12c owners would recognize theirs as a "10C series calculator"? (One could also wonder whether the Museum's navigation should be geared more toward newbies or to enthusiasts?)