Rise Over Run Calculator | Slope And Formula

The rise-over-run formula is quite literally that, "rise over run", as that is how you would calculate the slope of a straight line joining any two points. All you need to do is calculate the difference between the two points in the vertical direction (rise) and then divide it by the difference in the horizontal direction (run).

It does not seem complicated because (hopefully) it is not complicated. If you are still in doubt, let's take a look at an example. Imagine we have two points: (1,2)(1, 2)(1,2) and (4,8)(4, 8)(4,8). Let's calculate the rise over run (slope) of the line that goes through both of the example points.

You can very well use the Omni calculator, but we will do it by hand just to prove how easy it is to find. The first step is calculating the rise, which is the difference between y coordinates. If we assume that the points are given in Cartesian coordinates, that means we need to calculate the difference between the second coordinate of each point: y2−y1=8−2=6y_2 − y_1 = 8 − 2 = 6y2​−y1​=8−2=6.

Now the next step is to take the difference between the horizontal points, in our case that is the x variables, or the first coordinate of each point: x2−x1=4−1=3x_2 − x_1 = 4 − 1 = 3x2​−x1​=4−1=3. Remember that we are not using absolute value here, so this can be negative.

Now, all that's left to do is divide the rise over the run to get our slope. 6/3=26 / 3 = 26/3=2. It's just a simple division of two numbers, similar to the calculation of vertical exaggeration, used for the creation of 3D maps or animations. That wasn't too painful, was it?

You might find more complicated situations where the numbers aren't as easy to work with as in the example. And you might not be able to happily apply the rise over run formula and calculate it by hand in an instant. It is for those situations that we here at Omni have created the Rise Over Run calculator.