Expanded form calculator

Type a whole number or a decimal, with or without commas, and its expanded form appears straight away. Put one number on each line to do a list at once. The working shows the place of every digit, and the chart under it lays the digits out in their columns.

Show as switches between the forms teachers use. Expanded form is a plain sum, 4000 + 50 + 2. Expanded with × writes each digit times its place, 4 × 1000 + 5 × 10 + 2 × 1. Exponential form uses powers of ten, 4 × 10³ + 5 × 10¹ + 2 × 10⁰, and the fractions form writes tenths and hundredths as 1/10 and 1/100.

In our number system, a digit's value depends on its place. The 4 in 4,052 is worth 4,000 because it sits in the thousands place. Expanded form writes the number as the sum of what each digit is worth, so you can see every place at once. Adding the parts back up gives the number again.

Zeros are left out, because a zero adds nothing. They still matter in the number itself, holding the other digits in their places, which is why 4,052 and 452 are different numbers.

Digits after the decimal point are worth tenths, hundredths, thousandths and smaller. 0.36 is 0.3 + 0.06, or 3 × 1/10 + 6 × 1/100 with fractions, or 3 × 10⁻¹ + 6 × 10⁻² with powers. Each place to the right is worth a tenth of the one before it.