Scientific Notation Converter

A scientific notation converter rewrites a number in the compact form used to handle values that are very large or very small. Scientific notation expresses a number as a significand between 1 and 10 multiplied by a power of ten, so 12,345.678 becomes 1.2345678 x 10^4 and 0.000000123 becomes 1.23 x 10^-7. The value never changes, only the way it is written, which keeps long strings of zeros from making a number hard to read, type, or compare at a glance.

This tool reads a number written in any of the usual forms and gives you every other form at once. Type a plain decimal or an E-notation string such as 6.022e23, and it returns normalized scientific notation, E-notation, engineering notation, and the fully expanded decimal side by side. Engineering notation is the variant scientists and electrical engineers reach for, because its exponent is always a multiple of three, lining up with the metric prefixes kilo, mega, milli, and micro. The converter also reports the order of magnitude and the number of significant figures, and it can round the significand to a chosen number of significant figures for you.

Every conversion works on the digit string itself rather than through a floating-point number, so a 24-digit value like Avogadro constant or a tiny value like the charge on an electron is converted exactly, with no rounding error creeping into the lower digits. All of the work happens in your browser with JavaScript, which means nothing you enter is uploaded, logged, or stored, and the tool keeps working with no internet connection once the page has loaded. It is built for physics and chemistry homework, lab reports, engineering calculations, and any moment where a wall of zeros needs to become a clean power of ten, or the reverse.

As a number to scientific notation converter, it turns 0.00000456 into 4.56 x 10^-6 and 4.56e-6 in one step. Run the other way, it is a scientific notation converter to standard form: enter 7.1e8 and the decimal line shows 710000000. Write the power of ten with the letter e, as in 7.1e8 or 7.1E8, because the input box does not read a typed "x 10^" or a superscript exponent.