Calculators with spreadsheets

[Dave Britten]

Now obviously, the HP palmtops are king here, having Lotus 1-2-3 built-in, but this is a feature offered on some graphing/scientific calculators as well. These spreadsheet programs are typically very scaled down compared to anything on a computer, but I find they can still be useful, especially for problems where you've got multiple inputs and outputs, tabulated data, etc. See the attached screenshot for an example of a simple binomial probability distribution worksheet from my Casio fx-9860g Slim.

I haven't played with all the calculator spreadsheets that are available, so I'm wondering which ones are particularly good. This is what I know so far...

- Casio fx-9860 family: 26x999 limit, support for formulas and text labels, but no formatting. Fast and easy to use, so it's useful for simple worksheets or a very bare-bones account register.
- Casio Prizm family: I haven't tried it, but the manual makes it look basically the same as the fx-9860 version, but with the ability to format cell colors, either statically or with conditional formats.
- Casio fx-991EX ClassWiz: 5x41, no way to save multiple files, data is deleted when you exit spreadsheet mode. Fairly useless.
- TI-84 Plus CE (CellSheet app): Mostly the same as Casio's, but it's in color (and running on a Z80 instead of an SH-4, so it's noticeably slower). The UI isn't as streamlined either. But you can do some simple number formatting. I actually had it lock up on me once, and I had to hard-reset the calculator and restore a backup.
- TI-89 (CellSheet app): Doesn't look too different from the 84 version based on the manual, but it has better UI design. I don't have much experience with this one. Can file contents be accessed from a program?
- HP Prime: I haven't tried this one out much, but it seems to support column/row resizing. Is it possible to read/write file contents from a program? That would make for a pretty huge advantage over the competition.


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