[bugsnw]

Numbers has great potential, but there are some huge issues:
The interface is simple but the column and row headers look odd.
It lacks the ability to freeze cells. The interface when working with borders needs to be completely redone. Excel got this right with their graphical approach. With Numbers, sometimes you simply cannot remove a border or add one to a previously bordered cell. Importing simple Excel spreadsheets (such as a phone list) failed miserably. Text spread out over multiple cells was either covered or missing after the import.
By version 3, Numbers will be insanely great. It just needs the Apple spit and polish that gets added over time.

[tomburton56]

Thanks for the review! I'll stick with NeoOffice for my simple needs. (I use Mathematica for anything beyond the simplest arithmentic.) It does what I need, and it goes to and from Excel.

[jscottk]

Rob,
There is a simple reason for your data entry and sum problems: you're trying to use Numbers like Excel (a common mistake) and Numbers doesn't work that way (it works like Trapeze - yes, I'm THAT old). Excel is designed to only be an electronic ledger sheet. Numbers is designed to be a page layout program with tables of data that can do calculations. Once you get used to it, you'll find the Numbers/Trapeze paradigm far, far more powerful.
You should have only made a 13x6 table (can even be smaller, Numbers will add data rows and columns as needed without affecting your header and footer structure and by moving the other tables on the same page to fit), not a giant Excel grid, and then turn on all of the headers and footers in the inspector panel. Enter the header, footer, and name labels in the gray rows and columns and your data in the white cells. To sum the columns in the footers you can either: highlight a column of numbers and then drag the "sum" "button" from the bottom left corner to the footer cell underneath, or (in the case of the first column) type "=sum(ja", Numbers will fill in the rest for you (and by using headers and footers, you have automatically "named" this column "Table 1::Jan"). You should also give your table a suitable name in the Inspector Panel too.
This structure gives you an inherent formatting head start over Excel, because you can now use style sheets to format your tables (kind of like tables in InDesign, though no where near as powerful); something annoying to do in Excel because of it's "all cells in the grid are equal" starting point.
That being said, yes, Excel has a far greater depth of features. It aught to, it's been around for what, 23 years. And, yes, Numbers' graphs need A LOT of work (the "scatterplot" is a bastardized version of a bar graph, ugh).
Now, if they would just give Numbers Trapeze's matrix and vector math abilities!
Scott

[jscottk]

Oh, I forgot. While it's no where near as powerful as Excel's "freeze panes" abilities, when you use Header rows, they will show up on every page when a table gets too big to fit on a single page. (Of course, you can alway use the scaling slider in "print preview mode" to fit it all on one page if your want too!)
Scott

[rnelsonbyrne]

Trapeze has still not been equaled. What a great program!
One defect of Numbers yet unmentioned is its inability to transpose selections.
R. Nelson Byrne

[MacTechAspen]

This series of articles has been very good, but they all suffer from the same bias. They read like someone familiar with Office who is now trying out iWork.

I teach a lot of beginning computer users, and my experience is that Pages and Numbers are leaps and bounds easier for the average user to learn and use. Most people will never use the full power of a spreadsheet. In fact most people never ever use a spreadsheet at all.

Numbers helps them to overcome the fear of spreadsheets and get some work done with a learning curve that is paltry compared to Excel.

Neither this review nor the one on Pages really talked about the media palette, or the ease of adding images to the documents. No doubt this is an anathema to experienced Excel users, but for newbie spreadsheet users, pretty counts a whole lot more than powerful does.

I would love to see a comparison written by a first time user who has yet to develop a taste for one suite over the other.

Personally, I have used Office professionally, and I hate pretty much everything about it. It is always getting in my way and the things I consider simple in iWork are always hard in Office. As an ex AppleWorks user that only uses Office grudgingly (but enough to know it) I really prefer iWork.

There are two different paradigms here. Those who are thinking of using iWork as an alternative to Office, and those who have never touched, or want to touch Office, who are using iWork.

For the users I have encountered, iWork is Mac like in that they can use it right away with no instruction and get amazing results. Office is Windows like. Beat it into submission and it will do anything you want, and quite possibly even more than iWork. In the mean time, the iWork users are already on to their next project, without having to learn more than they needed to get the job done.

[cweber]

So well written, MacTechAspen! I was going to make many of the same points, but you did it better.
I will add that Numbers is far slower than Excel. It becomes glaringly obvious with large, complex spreadsheets, such as a mortgage calculator. Not that Excel is a speed demon either.
My daughter in college is living MS Office free, and couldn't be happier and more productive. Import and export to other formats works well enough, and she fights none of the fights which characterize life with Office for those who aren't power users.
Myself, I live 98% in iWork '08 and only deal with Office when I cannot avoid it. Never liked it, although I gladly used Word 1.0 on the original Mac, back when it was the latest and greatest word processor.

[arelny]

I played with Numbers at the Apple store, and no one there could tell me if or how to set print area. That feature is as important as freezing cells. How ludicrous if you have a large spread sheet and only want a portion of it to print.

[MacTechAspen]

arelny said:

I played with Numbers at the Apple store, and no one there could tell me if or how to set print area. That feature is as important as freezing cells. How ludicrous if you have a large spread sheet and only want a portion of it to print.

Fortunately, Apple Store employee's efficacy aside, it is wonderfully simple to set the print area (and not altogether unlike how you do it in Excel). There is an icon of a page on the bottom, click on it and you will get a slider that will resize the spreadsheet in real time.

[jscottk]

Numbers doesn't have a "print selected cells" (Excel's "Set Print Area") command, as it doesn't fit in its' philosophy.

If you are working with really large data sets, you're working in the wrong program and Excel is definitely the way to go (working with large data sets is definitely Excel's strength).

If you're trying to use Numbers like Excel and only have one mega-table containing a bunch of unrelated data and a bunch of blank cells to separate that data (like the example spreadsheet in this article), then you are using it incorrectly. In Numbers, you should make several smaller tables of related data with reporting in mind, and do your page layout accordingly (and Numbers has an interactive "Print View" that allows you to fit large tables to your printed pages). Data doesn't have to be contained in the same table in order for you to work with it. (Alternately, you can make a new sheet with a table that pulls/copies data from table in question. Kinda like a database report. That way, you won't have to set and reset the print area every time you want to print a different area of your data.)

Too bad the employees at that Apple store were so poorly trained, it's a lot quicker and easier to show this in action than it is write about it.

Where most people run into trouble with Numbers after becoming proficient in Excel (to quote a little green man) is that you "must unlearn what you have learned." Personally, I had to go the opposite way; I started out in Trapeze (Numbers' spiritual predecessor) and had to learn the Multi-Plan/Lotus 1-2-3/Excel way when Trapeze was abandoned by its' publisher.

[griffman]

For the record, the sheets I built in Numbers were built in the "Numbers style" -- separate tables on a sheet, or separate sheets. Even given that structure, however, the inability to simply select a certain range of cells to print is a missing feature -- there are times when you do just need to print a range of cells, and it may not work out that it's a nicely grouped selection that makes the slider work well.

As for the other observations about Numbers versus Excel, I don't necessarily disagree -- for someone with truly "light" spreadsheet needs, Numbers is a very good fit. I said as much on our podcast with Chris Breen last week. (Given the size of these programs, it was impossible to cover everything, which is why some shortcomings of both Excel and Numbers weren't included, and why we didn't include the other players in the spreadsheet arena.) If you need something that can be done with Numbers' templates, then it's a great solution -- it's templates are excelelnt.

However, I still believe that if you're going to do anything beyond managing a few rows and columns, or using a pre-defined template, you'll be better off with Excel in the long run. Numbers' limitations grow worse as the size and complexity of your sheets increase (no formulas in conditional formatting; no pivot tables; etc.). And while Excel is far from perfect, it's performance and feature set leave Numbers in the dust when you're working with more data.

As an example, Numbers slows to an absolute crawl if you try to feed it even a moderately-sized spreadsheet; I gave it a 3,000 row by 40 column sheet of random number generating formulas (0 to 100), and it took about 12 seconds to recalculate. I fed the exact same model to Excel, and it took under a second to recalculate. Even worse, though, is the fact that you can't turn calculations off in Numbers, so every single time you change any cell on your sheet, you wait 12 seconds. In Excel, if the under-one-second lag bugs you, you can disable recalc, and just calculate the sheet when needed.

Both have a role in the market, but with its current limitations, Numbers fits best at the entry level. I have no doubt things will improve in 2.0, and perhaps then, it will be more of a competitor for more serious spreadsheet development.

-rob.

[bowser]

The problem I see with Excel is that it has become a niche product; it's only really useful for those who are doing bookkeeping.
Excel lacks the ability to produce truly professional looking charts and tables; they end up looking amateurish at best. (As one poster mentioned he snickers inwardly whenever he sees an obvious Excel chart in a scientific presentation.) DeltaGraph is my solution and it is light years ahead of Excel for charts and tables, although I am going to look into Kaleidagraph since it got such a good mention here.
Excel also lacks the ability to do reliable statistical analyses. Maybe it's good enough for the corporate worker who occasionally needs to do a quick t-test or Chi-Square, but I have never seen Excel produce a valid analysis with data that I have run a comparable analysis on in SPSS. Excel always is incorrect in the computations it produces.
Finally, for doing any kind of serious number crunching; working with tens of thousands of data points from eye-tracking equipment, or spike trains from a neural electrode, Excel simply can't handle the kind of complex calculations needed such as fourier transforms, gaussian smoothing, spike density plots, and so on. MATLAB is by far the best choice for this kind of work.
Finally, the only real "spreadsheet" work I do anymore is making tables of student exam and homework assignment scores. A list of names with associated numbers, and a few simple calculations to compute averages, standard deviations, and final grades, and a quick histogram of the class distribution on the exam is all I need. Even though it does have some glaring weaknesses, Numbers does this with all the competency I need. If you need to do anything more serious you should be using Excel, and I refuse to buy Office 08. I also like that Numbers lets me make better looking tables and charts to use when discussing exam results with my students.
For any other serious data analysis or number crunching task, Excel is no longer capable of doing the job for me. I don't have any need for it anymore, let alone PowerPoint (don't even get me started on that, Keynote is light-years ahead of it), or Entourage. iWork, iCal, Mail, etc. are all I need for my daily tasks. Once I need to do serious computation, Office is out of its league. I'm glad to say I've left Office and its headaches behind with my new Intel MBP.

[MacTel]

I will stick to using Numbers for opening Excel attachments. It needs a big update before I'd use it to create spreadsheets over Excel (Windows version) and this review touched on the exact reasons I avoid it.

[jscottk]

Rob,

I don't disagree with your comments either. And if you really want to bring Numbers to its' knees, add a chart to that 30,000 by 40 spreadsheet and "enjoy" the "spinning beachball of death." Don't get me wrong, if you've got some heavy lifting to do on a lot of tabular data, look no further than Excel. I just wouldn't knock Numbers for not including an Excel feature that might not make a whole lot of sense when using Numbers as it is intended to be used (which clearly isn't to be all that Excel already is). (I also wouldn't read too much into how new users relate to the different philosophies represented by Excel and Numbers. They both lead to blank, confused stares in my experience.)

My comments about your use of Numbers was based on the screenshot on page 2 of the article with caption starting "Numbers Formulas:"; which clearly shows a single table with all of the data free floating in the middle, separated by unused cells and with the header, footer, and row labels unused. Is the screen shot out of sync with text of the article?

I too can't wait to see what v2 brings for Numbers, but, for now, it has already bumped Excel off of my Dock just as Pages and InDesign have bumped off Word. Luckily for us Mac users, we have a choice (a real choice, not just a choice between different copies of the exact same program, like our Windows counterparts) and can pick the program that's right for us. Especially if what's right for us runs counter to what the prevailing wisdom says it should be; as not everyone who crunches numbers is doing accounting (as the Excel paradigm presumes). To each, their own.

By the way, I'm always glad to see MacWorld's writers and editors take an interest here, it shows a real regard for the audience they serve with their writings and insights.

Thanks,

Scott