Multiplan

Multiplan was an early spreadsheet program from Microsoft, which Texas Instruments released on a module (on four 6K GROMs and a single 8K ROM) and disk- you needed both, and therefore required an expanded system.

Because the TI version used exactly the same keystrokes as the Microsoft PC release, you can refer to any Multiplan tutorial book and it will work for you.

To change screen colors in TI Multiplan

When the screen displays: "INSTALL PROGRAM DISK PRESS ENTER TO LOAD" if you press the space bar TWICE you will have access to eleven color choices.

Bug in Multiplan

In 1984 TI confirmed a bug in the SQRT (square root) function which could not be fixed but TI provided a multiple-cell workaround.

"If a square root is taken of a number less than one, AND contains an ODD number of zeros before the first significant digit (for example 0.01 or 0.000123), Microsoft Multiplan will calculate the square root incorrectly by a factor of ten. For example SQRT(0.01) is calculated as 1.0 instead of 0.1, and SQRT(0.000123) is calculated by Microsoft Multiplan as 0.110905 instead of 0.0110905.

The fix was to use two intermediate cells to test if the number you wanted a square root of fell into the error range, and if so, divide the result by ten.