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Essentially, the unit of measurement used by Microsoft Windows 7 is determined by settings in place within the Regional Settings applet within the Control Panel -- choices available are U.S. and Metric -- in this tutorial, I'll show you how you can change the units from U.S. to Metric, or vice versa.

Follow these steps to change the unit of measurement in Windows 7 (refer here for instructions using Windows 8, Windows Vista, and Windows XP):

1. Close all open applications. Click the Start button and then click Control Panel as shown in Figure 1.
   
   
   Figure 1: Control Panel selected
   
   
2. This opens the Control Panel, as shown in Figure 2. In this window, select the Clock, Language, and Region option (highlighted in red in Figure 2).
   
   
   Figure 2: Clock, Language, and Region options selected in Control Panel
   
   
3. From the resultant window, click on Region and Language option as shown in Figure 3 (highlighted in red).
   
   
   Figure 3: Region and Language option
   
   
4. This opens the multi-tabed Region and Language dialog box that you can see in Figure 4. In this dialog box, make sure that the Formats tab is selected, and click the Additional settings... button (highlighted in red in Figure 4).
   
   
   Figure 4: Additional settings button selected within Region and Language dialog box
   
   
5. This brings up Customize Regional Options, another multi-tabbed dialog box (see Figure 5) – make sure that you are on the Numbers tab. Locate the Measurement system option, click it, and choose Metric (or U.S.) from the resultant drop-down list.
   
   
   Figure 5: Metric measurement system selected within Customize Regional Options dialog box
   
   
6. Click OK to apply the changes.

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