A friendly tour of your HP Prime G2 — find the keys, open an app, and graph your first function.
Welcome! This page is your first 15 minutes with the HP Prime G2. No math yet — just finding your way around so the rest of the guide feels easy. Read it once with the calculator in your hand, pressing each key as it comes up. You can’t break anything by pressing keys, so explore freely.
Two “home bases”: Home view and CAS view
Your calculator has two main screens for doing math, and they each have a dedicated key.
- Home view — press the Home key. This is the everyday calculator: type numbers and operations, press Enter, get an answer. Use it for plain number-crunching (“nonsymbolic calculations”).
- CAS view — press the CAS key. CAS stands for Computer Algebra System. It works with symbols, not just numbers — it can factor, solve, and simplify algebra exactly (like giving you
{-2, 2} instead of a decimal). When you’re in CAS view you’ll see a small white CAS label in the title bar at the top, so you always know which screen you’re on.
The two screens look almost the same and each keeps its own history of what you’ve typed. You can switch between them anytime by pressing Home or CAS. Tip for later: a CAS command can be used inside a Home calculation and vice-versa, so you’re never “locked in.”
Most of the real work happens inside apps. To see all of them, press the Apps key. That opens the Application Library, a grid of icons.
To launch an app, do any one of these:
- tap its icon on the touchscreen, or
- use the arrow keys to move to it and press Enter, or
- start typing the first letters of its name to jump to it, then tap it or press Enter.
This guide uses five places in total:
| What | How you get there | What it’s for |
|---|
| Home view | Home key | Plain arithmetic, quick numeric answers |
| CAS view | CAS key | Exact algebra — factor, solve, simplify |
| Function app | Apps ▸ Function | Graphing y = f(x), tables, finding roots & vertices |
| Advanced Graphing app | Apps ▸ Advanced Graphing | Inequalities and relations with shaded regions |
| Solve app | Apps ▸ Solve | Solving equations and systems for an unknown |
Don’t worry about what each one does yet — later chapters walk you into them one at a time. For now, just know Apps is the door to all of them.
Typing an expression
Inside Home view (or any app’s entry line), you type math the way it looks on paper — this is called Textbook entry mode. Type your numbers, operations, and variables, then press Enter to get the answer.
A few keys that matter:
- ( ) — the parentheses keys group things together. When you use a function, the calculator often adds parentheses for you automatically; press ( yourself when you want to group manually.
- The Templates key — opens a palette of ready-made math shapes: fractions, square roots, powers, and more. Tap the shape you want, then fill in the little boxes. This is the easy way to type a fraction or a root without fighting the keyboard.
- The (−) key (negative sign) is different from the − subtraction key. Use (−) to make a number negative, like −5; use − to subtract one thing from another.
Look at the bottom row of the screen. Those six buttons aren’t printed on the keyboard — they’re soft buttons that change depending on what you’re doing, and you press them by tapping the screen. They’re your context-sensitive menu. If a pop-up menu opens and you want to back out without choosing anything, press the Esc (Cancel) key.
One thing that trips people up: there is both a Menu key on the keyboard and a Menu button that sometimes appears on screen. They are not the same. When this guide says “tap Menu,” it means the on-screen button unless it says “the Menu key.”
Shift and Alpha — the “second labels” on keys
Many keys can do more than one thing.
- Shift — press it, then press another key, to use that key’s blue/second function (the one printed in the shifted color). You’ll see a small up-arrow indicator turn on when Shift is active.
- Alpha — press it, then a key, to type a letter (A–Z). You’ll see an A…Z indicator when Alpha is on.
So when the guide writes something like Shift + Plot, it means: press Shift, release, then press the Plot key.
There’s also a Toolbox key (sometimes called the menu key) that opens collections of commands: Math, CAS, App, Catlg (catalog), and User. You’ll use it later for CAS commands — just know it exists.
Defining a function and finding f(a)
A big part of Algebra II is “plug a number into a function.” Here’s the cleanest way on the Prime:
- Open the Function app: Apps ▸ Function. You land in Symbolic view — the “defining view.”
- There are ten definition slots: F1(X), F2(X), … F9(X), F0(X). Highlight F1(X)= and type your function. The [X,θ,T,N] key types the X for you. Press Enter when done. (To change one you already typed, tap Edit first.)
- To read the value at a specific X — say f(3) — press the Num key for the table, put the cursor in the X column, and type 3. The table jumps to the x = 3 row and shows F1’s value there.
There’s also a quick “store a value” route in Home view: type a value, tap the Sto▶ soft button, type a letter A–Z to name it, and press Enter. That saves the number in that variable so you can reuse it. You’ll mostly use the Function-app table above for evaluating f(a) in this guide.
Walkthrough: graph your very first function
Let’s put it together. Follow along — this is the single most useful skill on the whole calculator.
- Press Apps to open the Application Library.
- Select Function (tap it, or arrow to it and press Enter). You land in Symbolic view.
- Highlight the F1(X)= slot and type 2*X+1. Use the [X,θ,T,N] key to type the X. Press Enter.
- Press the Plot key.
You should see a straight line crossing the screen, climbing as it moves to the right. Congratulations — that’s the graph of y = 2x + 1!
While you’re on the Plot screen:
- A blinking tracer sits on the line, and its coordinates show at the bottom of the screen. Press the left/right arrow keys to slide the tracer along the curve and watch the numbers change.
- Press the + and − keys to zoom in and out.
To double-check the graph with numbers, press the Num key for the table, type 0 in the X column, and press Enter — the F1 value should be 1, because 2·0 + 1 = 1. The picture and the table agree. That’s the whole game.
You’re oriented. From here, each chapter picks one kind of problem and shows you exactly which app and keys to use — and you already know how to find all of them.
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