[MW Forums]

Numbers ’08 is a strong entry for Apple in the spreadsheet arena, especially for those who find Excel’s feature set overwhelming. With its free-form layout, easy-to-use templates, and elegant interface, Numbers is a powerful, yet approachable, tool. more

[macFanDave]

Thanks, Rob, for pointing out the poor scientific graphing. I'm always looking to go MS-free and I think that Pages and Keynote will do the job for me, but Numbers can't knock off Excel just yet.
My current Macs are all PowerPC, so Office 04 will be OK for the time being, but I am not looking forward to making the Intel transition and having to shell out for Office Two-thousand-futzak. Hopefully, Numbers will improve XY graphs enough that I can get off the Ballmer-Gates milking machine. (Maybe, they will leap-frog Excel and include double-Y graphs. The best example that many people may be familiar with is car engine graphs where rpm's are on the x-axis and torque is on the left-hand y-axis and horsepower is on the right-hand y-axis. Cricket Graph could do that!)

[cseeman]

Does Numbers support Fixed Width Field import?
I'd also ask about Tab and Comma delimited but Fixed Width is important.
I'm often handed "old" exports with Fixed Width defined fields.
I'm finding that government agencies with old computers/spreedsheets/databases still use Fixed Width.
Excel does this by guessing the Widths or allowing the user to enter info to define such widths.

[aestival]

Quote:

---

Scientific users will find the chart options lacking

---

... and this is different from Excel exactly how? -- I've even given up on DeltaGraph and now generate SVG graphics directly from C programs and simulations, for later touch-up in Illustrator (Illustrator's plotting is OK, but the way it generate plots is a bit wonky for editing, unfortunately).
The plotting in Numbers seems more or less the same as in Keynote & Pages, so at least it's consistent, and the bar/pie charts are as good as ever.
Oh, and Numbers is head and shoulders above any Microsoft product at handling copy & paste from Illustrator, since it imports the proper PDF version of whatever's on the clipboard, and you can even copy & past graphics, or even entire PDF files directly into cells (don't recall ever being able to do that in Excel).
Those scientists grumbling about poor plotting will probably be satisfied with (finally) being able to paste equations and styled text into ordinary cells.

[Gee4orce]

This review seems a bit harsh as you're comparing something that costs one third of $79 to something that costs $199 on it's own.
In my opinion, Numbers is perfect for the kind of things that the vast majority of people do with spreadsheets. It's way more than just competent.
As for people wanting scientific graphing: http://www.graphsketcher.com/

[Schneb]

Quote:

---

something that costs one third of $79

---

Slight correction. Numbers does not cost $79 per se. It costs $79 for iWork. It actually costs $26. That is, one of three worthy applications. But I agree with your point. As an introduction, this is a solid spreadsheet program. Compete with Excel? Not yet. But it is quite a few dollars less than Excel.
My spreadsheet needs are few and simple. My home improvement documentation for future Capitol Gains assessment was imported from a previous Excel sheet. Good thing I had the latest version of Excel... it would not import an earlier version.
It was fantastic to break each year into an individual table, format it, then place it where ever I desired. The left-hand menu made it a snap to jump from year to year, and printing now (you never knew what you were getting from Excel) was a breeze--and it looked good too! A solid program for the average joe like me.

[AlFeldzamen]

I keep personal finance data in Excel spreadsheets, updating each month. But when I tried to import such a spreadsheet into a trial version of Numbers, a spreadsheet with 112 rows and 111 columns, I got a "file too large to import" message. Now, was this a limitation of the trial version, of Numbers itself, of my aging G4 Mac?
Undaunted, I went over to my wife's newer, more powerful machine (a globed, lamp-type iMac), with more memory, a faster processor, etc. Same result.
What's going on here?
Al Feldzamen

[danmusician]

Quote:

---

Slight correction. Numbers does not cost $79 per se. It is actullay $26 for three worthy applications. But I agree with your point. As an introduction, this is a solid spreadsheet program. Compete with Excel? Not yet. But it is quite a few dollars less than Excel.

---

Gee4orce actually covered that...
"you're comparing something that costs one third of $79"

[griffman]

"Does Numbers support Fixed Width Field import?"
No, it will not import fixed width files and properly parse them. You could do that one of two ways. The easy way would be to send them through Excel first; the hard way would be to use a series of FIND() formulas to parse the file (Numbers will import a fixed-width text file with each row in one cell in Numbers). I've done the latter, and while it's not fun, it does work.
I'd also ask about Tab and Comma delimited but Fixed Width is important.
Comma delimited came in just like fixed width, but tab-delimited seemed to work fine.
-rob.

[griffman]

"... and this is different from Excel exactly how?"
Why does that matter? I wasn't comparing Numbers' scientific graphs with those of Excel. I was merely mentioning that they're pretty bad all on its own (and yes, similary bad in Pages and Keynote). From reading the web, and talking to friends in that field, there are lots of them who would love to give up their current tools and move to Keynote and Numbers in particular. However, if you can't even put error bars on a simple graph, they can't really use either product in its current form.
And for the record, Excel does have better scientific graphing options than does Numbers. While far from perfect, you can at least have error bars, and there are other chart types that Numbers doesn't offer.
"The plotting in Numbers seems more or less the same as in Keynote & Pages, so at least it's consistent"
I wish it showed that same consistency with AppleScript /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif.
-rob.

[Schneb]

Quote:

---

Gee4orce actually covered that... "you're comparing something that costs one third of $79"

---

You are correct, Dan. Sorry Gee4orce! I read your post as "costing a third of Excel" and not "a third of $79".

[cseeman]

Thanks Rob.
Ugh!