Entering values using scientific notation

Writing out very large or very small numbers like 14000000000000.0 or 0.0000000328 can be a bother. It is tedious to write all those zeros, and it is also easy to make a mistake counting zeros, thereby causing your value be off by a factor of 10 or 100. One way to address this problem is to use scientific notation. The value, 1200, can also be expressed as 1.2 times 1000. In scientific notation, it looks like this:

But another problem arises: how do you enter such a value into a computer? The times symbol isn't really the same as the letter "x", and most computers have no convenient way to indicate that a number should be written as a superscript. When the first computer languages were developed, and this problem was first considered, an alternative way of writing scientific notation was developed. In this alternative notation, the "times 10" is replaced by the letter "E" (probably for "exponent") and the exponent itself is written flush on the baseline instead of as a superscript. In this notation, the value 1200 looks like this:

Some of the newer calculators are able to display scientific notation that looks like the first of the two examples above. However, older calculators, computer programming languages, spreadsheets like Excel, and the web-based scripts you will encounter in chemistry laboratory classes at the University of Oregon all display and expect you to enter values in scientific notation using the format shown in the second example.

Here are some more examples of how various numbers are expressed using the "E" form of scientific notation:

       100           1E2      \
       100           1E+02     | These are all equivalent
       100          +1E02      |
       100           1E+2     /
       100.0         1.000E2
       7654          7.654E3
      -4000         -4E3
       0.0087        8.7E-3
      -0.095        -9.5E-2