Is There a Notes App on the TI-84? How to Save Formulas Instead

No — despite plenty of tutorials titled “how to save notes on a TI-84,” there’s no dedicated Notes app on any TI-84 model, CE included. What those tutorials are actually describing is a workaround: using the program editor to hold plain text instead of a program that runs.

The actual method: a “program” that’s really a note

Press PRGM → NEW, name it something like NOTES or FORMULAS, and instead of writing runnable TI-BASIC, just type out what you want to remember — a formula, a set of steps, whatever. You never have to run it. To read it back later, go to PRGM → EDIT and open it again; the text is sitting there exactly as you left it.

The one thing to know: if you do accidentally run it (pressing ENTER on its name from the PRGM menu runs it rather than opening the editor), plain text isn’t valid TI-BASIC and it’ll throw a syntax error. That’s harmless — the note itself isn’t damaged, and PRGM → EDIT still opens it fine. Just don’t confuse the error for the note being lost.

Other ways people store this

• Strings (under VARS → String) hold pure text in a named slot (Str1–Str9, Str0) — a smaller-scale version of the same idea, better suited to one short formula than a whole page of notes.
• App variables, transferred from a computer with TI Connect CE, can hold longer text and are easier to edit on a keyboard before pushing to the calculator — useful if you’re building out a big reference sheet rather than jotting something down mid-class.

Try it yourself

The TI-84 calculator here has the same trick available in Programs mode: write a program using Disp "your text here" on each line — it’s valid syntax (so running it just prints the text back), and it’s exactly what you’d read again later, saved and reopened from the sidebar like any other program.