Adding feet, inches, and fractions

[Brad Barton]

I find the WP-34S very useful in this regard. The fraction routines are very flexible. For example in woodworking I feel pretty comfortable making measurements and marking lines in 1/64" increments.

With the 34S, I can force the denominator to display numbers no larger than 64 (or whatever number I find useful), and also force them to be in powers of 2 if I wish. That way when I add or subtract several measurements, the answer is always in a usable number format, rather than some wild fraction that I have to convert to 16ths, 32nds or 64ths. If the answer is non-exact, it gives the closest approximation, and indicates if the approximation is slightly-more-than or slightly-less-than the exact answer. I find this incredibly useful and thus I have two of them; one in the shop and one in office.

I don't think that it will display feet, however, a few keystrokes (<enter>, 12, /) could tell you how many feet are in your measurement. Then use X<>Y to toggle back to the inches/fraction measurement, or (IP (integer part),12,*,-) if you wish. All of these commands are on the keyboard (with an f-shift for the IP function) so you don't have to menu-dive to find them.

I am not much of a 34S fanboy for other uses, but I feel that it can't be beaten for fraction handling of imperial unit measures. Perhaps this function set would be a nice addition to the Prime. Of course it's pretty easy to program, but I'd prefer to have the functions accessible directly from the keyboard.