A while back I told you I was overhauling my application lineup. In the spreadsheet department Excel was getting tired. I had long had my eye’s on Apple’s iWork “productivity suite” but had not taken the plunge. For a long time this was because iWork had no spreadsheet application. When Apple finally released Numbers it wasn’t a matter of if I would switch from Excel but when. A few weeks back I finally took the plunge.
I am not a heavy spreadsheet user in the sense that I don’t live and breath by them. With large data sets and complex multi user needs I go with MySQL or Filemaker. But Excel has always been a can-opener of sorts. Often I’ll need to open a CSV or Tab delimited file to have a peak, maybe clean it up before inserting into a database.
Numbers seems to work fairly seamlessly with all of my old XLS documents. I have a spreadsheet I use to record my monthly bill payments. It has a bunch of sum fields as well some more complicated cells that utilize conditional formatting based on another cells calculations to set the background color of the cell.Opening this in Numbers presented zero problems. I also opened a very complex 3 worksheet doc from my banker the other day, filled ion the appropriate fields that auto-populated other fields on various worksheets in the document, exported it as an Excel document and emailed it back to him. No problem, the bank guy didn’t even know I didn’t use Excel let alone a PC.
I would expect that more complex spreadsheets may not work perfectly with numbers. I do get a small warning box every time I open an Excel doc in Numbers. It warns me of the errors it encountered opening the document. Typically these are not important, a small formatting feature that Numbers does not support or something of that nature. The bank document mentioned above had 3 or 4 warnings, but it still worked… good enough. If you make your living with Excel the transition will likely be a little more frustrating, but for casual users I think numbers is very much up to the task of handling your Excel dependencies.
What do I like about Numbers you ask? Lets get straight to it.
Nothings perfect right? Numbers isn’t - I have found already a some places where it falls short.
I like numbers. It’s main disadvantage’s I feel will be addressed as the application matures. The price is a big hit with me and I like the overall ease of use.
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Review, Software, iWork, Apple, Mac
2 Responses
Ben
December 1st, 2008 at 5:22 pm
1How do you figure you get four apps for $79?
I count three: Keynote, Pages, and Numbers.
Chris
December 1st, 2008 at 5:30 pm
2My bad, guess I was day dreaming - your right, its three apps.
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