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About this tool
Turn a decimal number into scientific (E) notation and see its order of magnitude.
The Scientific Notation Converter rewrites any decimal number as a mantissa between 1 and 10 times a power of ten, using exponent = floor(log10(|n|)) and mantissa = n ÷ 10^exponent. Enter a value such as 0.00042 and you get the scientific form, the E-notation form, the engineering form whose exponent is always a multiple of 3, plus the mantissa, exponent, order of magnitude and sign listed separately. It is built for students, lab workers and engineers who need the exponent itself, not just a shorter-looking number.
Open Scientific Notation Converter on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Type a value into the Number field — 0.00042, a plain decimal, or something already in E notation such as 1.2e+11.
The Result panel recomputes on every keystroke with no submit step; Reset restores the 0.00042 default.
Copy takes the Decimal, Scientific, E Notation, Engineering, Mantissa, Exponent, Order of Magnitude and Sign rows.
Shows both the standard 1-to-10 mantissa form and the engineering form snapped to exponents that are multiples of 3, so SI prefixes map directly.
Mantissa, exponent, order of magnitude and sign are listed as separate rows instead of being buried inside one formatted string.
Accepts values already in E notation, keeps ten significant digits in the mantissa, trims trailing zeros, and reports zero as 0 × 10^0 rather than failing on log10(0).
Move the decimal point until exactly one non-zero digit sits to its left, then multiply by ten raised to the number of places you moved. Formally the exponent is floor(log10(|n|)) and the mantissa is n divided by 10 to that exponent, which always lands the mantissa in the range 1 ≤ |m| < 10. For 0.00042 the decimal moves four places right, giving 4.2 × 10^-4.
Engineering notation restricts the exponent to multiples of 3, so the mantissa can range from 1 up to 1000 instead of 1 to 10. That is why 0.00042 is 4.2 × 10^-4 in scientific notation but 420 × 10^-6 in engineering notation — the -6 exponent matches the micro SI prefix, which is why engineers prefer it.
The e stands for 'times ten to the power of', so 1.2e+11 is 1.2 × 10^11, or 120,000,000,000. It is the plain-text form calculators, spreadsheets and programming languages use because superscripts are not available, and this converter accepts it as input and reports it as its own output row.
It is the power of ten in the number's scientific notation — the exponent on its own. A value of 4.2 × 10^-4 has an order of magnitude of 10^-4, and a number one order of magnitude larger is roughly ten times bigger, which is how quantities of very different scale get compared quickly.
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