PHARM/PCS V5

1. About PHARM/PCS

PHARM/PCS is the Pharmacologic Calculation System — the software companion to the Manual of Pharmacologic Calculations with Computer Programs by Tallarida and Murray. For four decades it has helped students, educators, and researchers teach, learn, and verify the foundational calculations of pharmacology.

The original PHARM/PCS V4.0 was published in 1987 as Appendix B of the Manual. It was written in BASIC for DOS, distributed on floppy diskette, and required you to consult printed statistical tables for many procedures. Version 5 is a complete, modern rebuild. The same 48 calculations — same equations, same equation numbers, and the same worked examples as the printed book — now run directly in any web browser, with greater precision and no table lookups.

This guide is written for students and educators. It walks through how to open the app, enter data, read and export results, and use the built-in book examples as a teaching tool. A complete reference to all 48 procedures appears at the end.

2. Getting Started

Opening the app

PHARM/PCS V5 runs entirely in your web browser. There is nothing to download or install. Open the app at app.pharmpcs.com. The same code runs unchanged on Windows, Mac, Chromebook, iPad, and phones.

The self-test indicator

Every time the page loads, PHARM/PCS silently re-runs more than 300 numeric assertions — checking every implemented procedure against the worked example printed in the Manual. A status indicator in the header shows the result: it turns green only when all assertions pass. If you ever see it red, the numbers on screen should not be trusted — please let us know.

The Quick Start panel

On your first visit, a short welcome panel introduces the essentials. You can reopen it any time from the link in the footer. If you are new to the app, the fastest way to learn any procedure is to open it and click Calculate — the book example is already there (see Section 5).

3. A Tour of the Interface

The screen has two main areas: a category sidebar on the left, and the working panel on the right where you enter data and read results.

The category sidebar

The 48 procedures are grouped into nine pharmacology categories that follow the structure of the book itself:

• Dosage & Statistics — 7 procedures
• Dose-Response & Potency — 4 procedures
• Receptor Pharmacology — 6 procedures
• Enzyme Kinetics — 3 procedures
• Drug Decay & Binding — 5 procedures
• Pharmacokinetics — 7 procedures
• ANOVA & Comparisons — 7 procedures
• Pairwise & Nonparametric — 6 procedures
• Special Methods — 3 procedures

Click a category to expand it, then click a procedure to open it in the working panel.

The search box

The search box above the sidebar filters procedures by name or keyword as you type — so typing "ANOVA", "Scatchard", or "probit" jumps you straight to what you need without hunting through categories.

On phones and tablets

On narrow screens the sidebar collapses into a slide-in drawer behind a hamburger (☰) button in the top corner. Tap it to open the menu, choose a procedure, and the drawer closes so the full width is available for your data.

4. Running Your First Calculation

Every procedure follows the same three-step rhythm:

1. Choose a procedure from the sidebar (or find it with the search box).
2. Review or enter your data. Every procedure opens with its book example already loaded, so you can run it straight away — or type over the values (or paste your own) when you are ready.
3. Click Calculate, then read the results and any chart below. Nothing computes until you click Calculate.

5. Entering Your Data

Input fields and the data grid

Simpler procedures use a few labelled input fields. Procedures that take several groups of values — like the ANOVA tests — use a spreadsheet-style data grid with named groups and add/remove buttons for both rows and groups, so you can shape the grid to match your experiment.

Book examples, loaded and ready

Every procedure opens with its book example already filled in, so a working calculation is one Calculate click away. The Load book example button reloads those textbook values at any time — handy for restoring them after you have entered your own data. Because the output matches the printed page, it is both a learning aid and a quick way to confirm the procedure is behaving as expected.

Pasting from Excel

You can paste data straight from a spreadsheet. Copy a rectangular block of columns in Excel, click any cell in the grid, and press Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on Mac) — the columns are distributed across the groups automatically, and uneven group lengths are handled correctly. Each data area shows a short hint that it accepts a paste, and after you paste, a brief confirmation tells you how many rows and columns landed and how many groups they filled, so you can be sure the data went where you expected. A plain text area is also available for pasting from any clipboard source.

Smart guards

If something about the input is not right — too few points, mismatched group sizes, a non-numeric entry — PHARM/PCS responds with a clear, plain-English message telling you what to fix, rather than failing silently or returning a misleading number.

A note on the "Advanced" override fields

Three procedures — Newman-Keuls (36), Duncan (37), and Dunnett's test (44) — now compute a critical value that the 1987 program asked you to type in. Each of these has a small Advanced section. Leave it blank to use the computed value, which is what most users want. Fill it in only to override the computation with a value from a specific published table — useful for matching a result generated against a particular textbook table, or for comparing against a statistical package that uses a slightly different convention.

6. Reading Your Results

Formatted output and p-values

Results appear in a formatted panel next to your inputs. Where the original program could only tell you whether a result was significant at your chosen alpha, V5 reports exact two-tailed p-values alongside the test statistic, so the strength of the evidence is visible at a glance.

Publication-style charts

Charts are drawn for 44 of the 48 procedures, rendered directly from the computed results and scaled to fit any screen. They include linear regressions with confidence bands; graded and quantal dose-response and probit curves; double-reciprocal (Lineweaver-Burk) and Schild plots; Scatchard binding plots; exponential growth and decay curves; shaded area-under-the-curve plots; pharmacokinetic concentration-time profiles; "homogeneous subsets" plots for the ANOVA range tests; and Runge-Kutta numerical integration. (The four procedures without a chart — 1, 2, 41, and 43 — each return a single summary value with nothing to plot.)

Precision you can trust

All arithmetic is done in double precision — roughly 15 to 16 significant digits, about a thousand times more headroom than the 1987 interpreter. Where the new output differs from the printed book in the fifth significant figure, the new value is the more accurate one: the difference is a rounding artifact of 1987 single-precision arithmetic, not a change to the science.

Built-in guidance: the Reference panel

Every procedure opens with a set of expandable help boxes directly beneath its opening description — Equations, Expected output, and, new in Version 5.4, Reference. Click a box to expand it in place, and click again to collapse it.

The Reference box gives plain-language guidance in three short parts: what the procedure computes, when to use it, and how to read the result. Cross-references to related procedures are live links, so you can jump straight from, say, a graded dose-response to its quantal counterpart or to the potency analyses that build on it. It is the quickest way to choose the right procedure and to avoid the classic pitfalls in reading its output.

7. Saving and Sharing Results

Every results panel has buttons to copy or export what you see:

• Copy — produces a clean, tab-delimited table that matches exactly what is on screen and pastes neatly into both Word and Excel.
• CSV — downloads the results as a comma-separated file for spreadsheets.
• Right-click any chart — choose Copy or Save Image As… from your browser's menu to grab the graph as an image (PNG) for a slide deck, paper, or report.

Column headings sit directly over their own data in every procedure, so a copied or exported table lines up correctly — which matters most in the multiple-comparison tables where you read a number by its label.

8. For Students and Educators

PHARM/PCS V5 is built to teach. A few ways to use it in a classroom or study setting:

• Demonstrate a method in one click. Load the book example for any procedure and step through the inputs and outputs live — the result matches the printed page, so students can follow along in the Manual.
• Verify homework against the book. Because every procedure carries the same number, equations, and worked example as the text, students can check their own hand calculations against the app.
• Move from example to experiment. Start from the loaded example, then replace the numbers with the student's own data to see how the result changes.
• Trust the numbers. The green self-test indicator confirms all 300+ book examples still reproduce exactly, every time the page loads.

9. What's New in Version 5

Version 5 modernizes the engine and the user experience without revising the science. The procedures, formulas, and worked examples are exactly those of the Manual.

Highlights

• All 48 procedures, faithful to the book, grouped into nine searchable categories.
• Every statistical lookup table replaced by direct computation — Student's t, F, probit, chi-square, studentized range (q), and Dunnett's d — at any degrees of freedom and any confidence level.
• Double-precision arithmetic throughout.
• Spreadsheet-style data grids, paste-from-Excel, and one-click book examples.
• Publication-style charts for 44 of 48 procedures.
• One-click Copy and CSV export.
• Exact two-tailed p-values, which the original could not report at all.
• A built-in Reference panel on every procedure — plain-language guidance on what it computes, when to use it, and how to read the result, with live links to related procedures.
• Runs on any device; a 300+ assertion self-test re-verifies every procedure on load.

Recent Updates

• 5.4 — A new Reference panel for every procedure: an expandable box, alongside Equations and Expected output, with plain-language guidance on what the procedure computes, when to use it, and how to read the result — and live links to related procedures.
• 5.3 — Paste-from-Excel now works in every procedure, including the grids; each input confirms a successful paste; result tables align headings over their own columns; the Copy button output matches the screen exactly.

Then and now

10. Procedure Reference

All 48 procedures of the Manual of Pharmacologic Calculations, in the order and categories shown in the sidebar. Each carries the same procedure number and worked example as the printed book.

11. Tips and Troubleshooting

• Nothing happens when I click a procedure. On a phone or tablet, open the ☰ menu first — the sidebar is a slide-in drawer on narrow screens.
• My pasted data landed in one cell. Make sure you are on 5.3 or later, click a cell in the grid first, then paste. Copy a rectangular block (whole columns) from Excel.
• The results look slightly different from the book. Differences in the fifth significant figure are expected and are more accurate than the 1987 printout — see Section 6.
• The status indicator is red. Do not rely on the on-screen numbers; reload the page, and if it stays red, report it.
• I want to match a specific textbook table. Use the Advanced override field on procedures 36, 37, and 44 (Section 5).