index_icon_numbers20070807.pngA 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 In The Real World : Excel Handling

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.

Strengths

What do I like about Numbers you ask? Lets get straight to it.

  1. It’s An Apple Product. Apple gets how a Mac should work. Although they aren’t always perfect, they make sure their apps integrate with the essentials like iPhoto, Mail and the whole OS X experience.
  2. The Price Is Right. I am sooooooo tired of being robbed of hundreds and hundreds of dollars everytime I need to upgrade a single app. iWork gets you 4 apps for $79. Nothing more to say.
  3. It’s Easier to Use. Only having used Numbers for a short time I have found it much easier to create forumlas, format cells and make charts. Excel was always so nit picky. Numbers feels much more intuitive.

Weaknesses

Nothings perfect right? Numbers isn’t - I have found already a some places where it falls short.

  1. It’s Slow When Opening Large Documents. I have a few spreadsheets that get emailed from vendors everyday in both Excel and tab-delimited format. Excel opens these much faster. One of these documents is 13MB and has 15,000. On my 2.3Ghz MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM it takes 2 minutes and 26 seconds to open. Excel its like 5 or 10 seconds. Standard spreadsheets are no problem but however Numbers is parsing the documents, it’s taking a long time.
  2. Text Formatting Is Silly. I hate the Apple default text formating panel that many applications use. Numbers uses this default text format pallet. This means I have to pop open and wrestle with this beast every time I want to change font attributes. What is time consuming is having to click all of the way to the text formatting tab in the inspector only to find I cannot control fonts sizes and styles. It lets you align text and set kerning and leading but makes you open the ugly step child text panel to set font face, size and styles. Ridiculous.
  3. Exporting Options Are Lacking. Exporting a spreadsheet does give you the basic options, CSV, PDF, Excel. Thats it. For better flexibility there should be options to pick your delimiter and line endings as well as exporting to XML.

Conclusion

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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