Microsoft PowerToys unit converter

I’ve been using MS PowerToys for a while. Mostly on my work computer for the Awake tool (never lets your computer sleep) and fancy zones, which lets me set up a virtual workspace that lets me snap windows to custom predefined segments of a large monitor.

but i discovered PowerToys run today. which lets you run lots of different things in a quick popup window. and one of them is unit converter. I need to do this fairly regularly for different things (including working on GF designs, sometimes).

So now, i can click alt-spacebar, the run tool will pop up, type “%% 3 in in mm” and it tells me 76.2mm, which can be copied to the pasteboard.

cool little utility. there are lots of cool things in powertoys if you’re a windows user. if you’re a power user at all, i would recommend taking a look at it.

Microsoft PowerToys | Microsoft Docs

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I use siri (handsfree) or google (chrome bar) for that sort of thing all the time, but this is a nice alternative for when neither of those are viable.

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more importantly, it’s just one of a whole bunch of potential useful tools in PowerToys. you should check the rest of them out.

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Ha! Flashback. I used a PowerToys plugin of sorts to have it notify me of new email and read the subject line, on Windows 95. :rofl: I think the email client was Eudora? Mindspring and my employer used it.

That lasted a month before it drove me nuts.

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yeah, i don’t think i could take that.

i used to have it way back then, too. but had stopped for a while. but the pandemic and working from home i ended up w/a 27" 4k monitor and really needed to segment it out. the utility that LG makes worked, but it was kinda annoying. so when i found fancy zones, i was all over that like white on rice.

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I haven’t played with power toys since I built this machine. Thanks for the reminder.

That will be handy as I am in the process of weening myself from imperial to go metric for designing in Fusion. I curse my indoctrination into the imperial system.

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That was my email client of choice back in the day as well. I think it also read usenet. :slight_smile:

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back in those days, at least for work, i was stuck with lotus notes. i think home email was still inside compuserve (prior to me buying my personal domain, which is my name).

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PowerTools is how I get it to show me my art in .svg files instead of the icon of Inkscape. There are all sorts of neat things in there!

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just in case anyone’s trying it out and wondering where the SVG preview is, here’s the screenshot. it’s under file explorer add-ons. There’s an entry for SVG preview (if you use preview panel) and one for SVG thumbnails.

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I guess I’d argue the PowerToy syntax, “%% 3 in in mm” is kind of sub-optimal in a confusing and redundant way.

Windows Calculator has a large suite of conversions.

But I just type what I want in to the address bar of my browser like so:

All praise Google.

:slight_smile:

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works that way, too. and that’s how i’ve always done it. but i don’t have to take my hands off the kbd or switch to another app to do the conversion in PTs.

neither is wrong, PTs is just another way.

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I have a 43" monitor I use for work (from home) and use Fancy Zones for that. I think I have 9 defined snapping zones…but I still have windows layered on top of each other :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: I really should close things down when I stop using them but I keep them open while a project is going on and only shut things off when I’m done done. Just like my desk used to look.

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