Did You Know You Can Delete Individual Digits on Your iPhone’s Calculator?

Contrary to some grade school teachers’ beliefs, we all walk around with calculators in our pockets these days. Your iPhone has a useable calculator that is great for figuring out the tip at a restaurant, or for help while crunching the numbers for your budget.

But there’s one major downside to using this digital calculator: If you accidentally press the wrong key, you have to clear your whole calculation, whether you just started, or have been stacking expression after expression. It’s frustrating, and it’s been a problem since the first calculator app on iPhone. But, as it turns out, it’s been a frustration in vain: You’ve been able to delete one digit at a time from your iPhone’s calculator this whole time.

Here’s how it works: Say you’re multiplying 52 by 64, but you accidentally type 63 by mistake. Rather than hit the “C” to clear the whole thing, just swipe from right to left on the numbers. You’ll see the 3 disappear, back to a solo 6. From here, you can enter “4,” to make it 64, and complete your original equation.

This works no matter how many numbers you have on-screen: Whether you have one or nine, you can swipe right to left to eliminate any numbers you didn’t mean to type. It always works chronologically, however: You can get rid of a “5” in the middle of a nine-digit number. If you want to, you’ll have to keep swiping, removing all numbers after 5 until you get to the one you really want to delete, the re-enter the rest.