A calculation you wrote three weeks ago is only useful if you can still tell what it was for. This release is mostly about that: annotating your math without breaking it, and getting the finished note out of the app.
Annotate Anything, Break Nothing
Until now, // was the only way to add a note to a line. Three more ways join it, and all of them are ignored by the math.
Labels. Start a line with a name and a colon, and the label becomes a heading for that line while the rest still calculates:
| Note | Result |
|---|---|
| Rent: 1200 + 300 | 1,500 |
| Groceries: 85 + 40 + 22 | 147 |
Inline notes in parentheses. Drop a word in brackets anywhere in an expression and it disappears from the arithmetic:
| Note | Result |
|---|---|
| 100 (rent) + 200 (food) | 300 |
That is 300. Parentheses containing a real calculation still group as normal — 100 * (2 + 3) is 500, unchanged. The app decides based on what is inside the brackets, so you never have to think about it.
Quotes and hashes. Text in "quotes" is ignored the same way, and a line starting with # is a heading that never shows an answer. Together with //, that is four ways to write prose next to your numbers. The headings and comments reference covers the ones that already exist today.
Labels also work in front of money and units, so Cost of iPhone: $999 and $5 (fee) // wire transfer both calculate correctly instead of going blank.
Conditionals Inside Expressions
Conditionals used to work on their own line. Now they compose:
| Note | Result |
|---|---|
| winter = false | false |
| gas = 120 | 120 |
| heating = gas * (if winter then 1 else 0) | 0 |
There is a ternary shorthand too — winter ? 1 : 0 means the same thing — and and, or, not, and xor all work inside a condition:
| Note | Result |
|---|---|
| usage = 450 | 450 |
| winter = false | false |
| usage > 100 and usage < 900 ? 10 : 20 | 10 |
| not winter ? 1 : 0 | 1 |
Branches are no longer restricted to plain numbers, so winter ? 10€ : 20€ returns money. The conditionals reference has the forms available today.
Parser Fixes That Match How You Write Math
Several expressions that used to leave a line blank now resolve the way you would expect on paper:
5 (2+3)is25, and2(3)is6— a number beside a bracket multiplies.-3^2is-9, not9, matching standard notation and your system calculator.-3!is-6.square root of 16andcube root of 27work as phrases, alongsidesqrt(16)andcbrt(27).- A typographic minus sign (
−), the kind you get pasting from other apps, subtracts instead of blanking the line. - An unfinished bracket or quote gives the best answer it can rather than nothing:
1 + (2is3.
Getting the Note Back Out
You can export a note as Markdown, plain text, CSV, or PDF, with the results included alongside the lines that produced them. Markdown keeps your headings, bold/italic, and lists intact. CSV is the one to reach for when a budget or an invoice needs to continue its life in a spreadsheet — see notepad calculator vs spreadsheet for where that handoff makes sense. PDF lays the note out as a two-column page with line numbers down the side, your note text, and the results next to each line.
Export lives in the tab’s context menu under an Export submenu, in the command palette, and — on mobile — from the Notes list.
Two Small Settings
Result alignment. Choose whether answers sit flush left, centred, or flush right in the result pane. Right alignment lines up the decimal points in a column of currency, which is the reason it exists.
Line rules. An optional faint rule under every line, ruled-notebook style. Off by default; turn it on if a long note is hard to track across.
The decimal separator now also defaults to your device locale rather than assuming a dot, so a comma-decimal region gets €1,50 without changing a setting first.
Try Notes Calculator in your browser — free
Further Reading
The full syntax reference lives in the documentation. The pricing page covers the optional one-time upgrade — the calculator is free either way.