Tutorial 4 of 6
One million dollars in cash
Beginner 5 min
See an amount of money as real banknotes — how many notes, how high the stack is, how much it weighs, how much floor it covers and how many EUR-pallets it fills.
Open the tab Money (key 3) or the template One million dollars in cash.
Amount and notes
Type the Amount of money: 10000, 1 million, 2.5 billion or 1e12 all work. Choose the Notes — US dollar notes, Euro notes or My own notes — and the Value of one note.
At the top, Height of the stack shows how high the notes pile up. The facts list adds the number of Notes, their Mass, Volume, the Area laid flat, the number of EUR-pallets and Bundles of 100.
A drawing puts your stack (pink) next to the object from the list that is closest in height, at one true scale. Compared with turns the numbers into sentences, for example how many football pitches the notes cover when laid flat.
Where the numbers come from
US notes measure 6.14 × 2.61 inches, are 0.0043 inches thick and weigh about 1 gram each — figures from the U.S. Currency Education Program and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. One million dollars in $100 notes is 10,000 notes, about 1.09 m high and 10 kg.
The European Central Bank publishes the sizes of euro notes but no thickness or mass. With Euro notes, the section Note details asks for the Thickness of one note (mm) and the Mass of one note in grams (0 = unknown); Sizewise marks both as your assumptions. With a mass of 0, the mass is shown as unknown instead of guessed.
My own notes also asks for Length (mm) and Width (mm) — useful for other currencies or play money.
Pallets
Under Pallets, Load height on a EUR-pallet (m) sets how high the notes are stacked on each pallet. Sizewise packs the notes on the 1.2 × 0.8 m pallet with the same algorithm as the How many fit view.
Next steps
- Big numbers made tangible explains numbers far beyond any amount of cash.
Ready to try it?