[griffman]

"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."
The mouse rating is not just based on the comparison to Excel. In fact, that's only a minor portion of the overall rating. We consider a number of things in the mouse rating, and 3.5 mice is between "good" and "very good." Given Numbers' strengths and weaknesses, it seems just about right.
A better mouse rating would probably read something like this:
For users who think Excel is too complex or too expensive, and need only work with smaller models: 5 mice
For experienced Excel users hoping to migrate to Numbers, and who work with large, complex data models: 1 mouse
* For AppleWorks users hoping to migrate: 3 mice
But there's only one mouse rating for the program, so the final score is a blend of the program's strengths and weaknesses across all potential users -- Apple themselves stood on stage and said that Numbers will open "nearly any" Excel file. To a lot of people, that sounded like an invitation to make the switch.
"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."
I completely agree with you, and said as much in the conclusion. That doesn't mean, though, that we can overlook some amazingly obvious flaws, such as these:
- Cannot 'freeze panes' to lock headers onscreen while scrolling
- Cannot split the sheet to view more than one area at once
- Cannot name a cell
- Cannot add error bars to a chart
- Cannot set a print range to print only a portion of the sheet
- No AppleScript support
- Can't lock a cell to protect it from changes
- Cannot set cells to display their formulas
Now, that's just a subset of a larger list that I have going here, but there's a reason I'm listing those: every single one of those things is possible in AppleWorks, which was last updated in 2003 and was also a consumer-targeted spreadsheet app. Did Apple not even look at what their own product could do?
Taken together, Numbers great layout, excellent templates, and unique features are offset by some issues that really shouldn't be there, even in a portion-of-$79 version 1.0 release. As such, I stand by the 3.5 mice figure as an accurate overall rating.
-rob.

[McNotMac]

Scientific users would use R, S, Matlab, SpotFire, etc. What would be nice with Numbers would be: AppleScript support, better file-format support, the ability to use it a a source for merging (e.g., mailing lists) with pages and Keynote, and fixes to X-Y graphs. I think it would have been nice to support things like pivot tables and more statistical functions and graphing, but I accept that that's not necessary. I don't think the app intends to be an "Excel Killer", even Excel is very long in the tooth -- I know many scientists that have long since outgrown it.

[rong]

One more (for me large) cannot. It can't link cells between separate workbooks/files. I have many workbooks that are interdependent and when imported into Numbers the number in the linked cell is there but not the reference. After talking with Apple I was told that this couldn't be done. This ability is nearly as old a spreadsheets. Lotus 123 and even Multiplan could do this the precursor of Excel. Until this gets added I can't convert over to Numbers. As an aside, NeoOffice does this without a problem unless you have some odd file name descriptions with / or ' in the file title.

[zeejay]

For 98% of my Excel uses, Numbers sounds more than adequate. Actually, I do a lot of simple graphs for big financial presentations, so Numbers really appeals to me for that. Excel's charts, like PowerPoint's presentations, still look incredibly Windows 95-era-retro in this day and age.
Question, though... I assume this is do-able, but when you copy and paste a chart/diagram from Numbers into Keynote, is it scalable Quartz-vector goodness, or is it a bitmap? Can charts be edited in place in Keynote? Any export options for diagrams? (Say, to place nice high-res diagram art in InDesign, etc.)

[macFanDave]

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...Ballmer-Gates milking machine.

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Had a good laugh at the visual that line produced. Thanks for the laugh.

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You're welcome. I try.

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I have no interest in Numbers now as Excel 11 does all that I need and more and my early adopting ways are now gone.

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Frankly, Excel 1.0 did just about all that I need (they may have added a little more control over chart symbols since the first version)! It's funny how Excel has never caught up with CricketGraph in what people are calling scientific graphing.

[griffman]

I think people are misinterpreting my words (always an issue /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif ). I don't think Numbers needs to be a full-blown replacement for Cricket Graph or some dedicated scientific charting tool. However, given the lack of even basic scientific graphs, and the inability to make charts with error bars, it's striking out at even the simplest of levels.
-rob.

[Graeme_Smith]

The comments about bad performance compared to Excel (which is running under Rosetta!) make me wonder about Apple's programmer's ability to make programs that can run efficiently and snappily. For example, running on my 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac, Adobe's Lightroom can way out perform Apple's Aperture in doing similar image adjustments. In Aperture, once you apply a few adjustments applying more is extremely sluggish and unresponsive which, in particular, makes accurate sharpening nearly impossible. Lightroom however performs flawlessly doing the same things.
I hope Apple can turn around this trend of trading performance for good GUIs and innovative features (not that I don't want cool features, but they don't do much good if they are too slow to use!).

[budopo]

I do a lot of basic data plots from tests. Basically, I need to import a txt file of data into a spreadsheet. Usually, it's about 20,000 rows and 20 to 60 columns. They're just plain numbers, though, not really anything that the spreadsheet calculates. Usually, it's just a simple x,y line graph that's plotted (with 1 to 4 lines).
So, basically I'm wondering if the sluggishness with large tables is due to having formulas in each cell, or will tables of plain numbers also slow it down, and can it import txt files and do line graphs w/ data from a few columns?

[emork]

I have been using Excel for years as a pretty heavy-duty user, but in my current occupation my need is more towards a spreadsheet to make nice documents and as an organisational tool. So I am anxious to see whether Numbers will fit the bill.
There is one thing I need to know, whether Numbers has a "lookup" formula of some kind, so that it can lookup data from raw data tables to present the value in a neater table. This I use all the time. Can anyone tell me whether Numbers has this feature?

[griffman]

Keep in mind you can download a free trial of iWork (fully functional, 30 days) directly from Apple's website. But yes, Numbers supports both VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP. I actually made an image of all of Numbers' functions:
All Numbers Functions
-rob.

[cmflyer]

macfanDave,
Double Y graphs are possible in Excel. In the source data / series tab for a chart you need to click Add and put in the cells for the other data set.

[bastion]

In addition to being bitten by some of the other annoyances listed, one that reall irks me is that it's impossible to bring up the function list while you're editing a cell's contents, either in the normal edit area or the popup formula editor. Say you want a cell to indicate the date X months from now. Numbers has a function for that, called EDATE that takes a date and an offset as arguments. But what's the function for today's date? In AppleWorks it was TRUNC(NOW()) but Numbers doesn't like that. So being, as we all are, new to Numbers I'd like to be able to place the insertion point in the argument list for =EDATE() and pick the new function I need from the list. But I can't. I have to stop editing to bring up the function picker to find out that it's called TODAY() or switch to Help Viewer.

[mawster23]

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I think people are misinterpreting my words (always an issue /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif ). I don't think Numbers needs to be a full-blown replacement for Cricket Graph or some dedicated scientific charting tool. However, given the lack of even basic scientific graphs, and the inability to make charts with error bars, it's striking out at even the simplest of levels.

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That's been my main frustration with Numbers so far. I work in genomics, and sure, much of the time I use R or write Perl scripts to analyze large data sets. But often I want to use Excel to do something simple without writing new code. If Numbers, like Excel, could display error bars, generate histograms, or perform some simple statistical tests, it would be so much more useful for many technical users.
I don't need a replacement for R, but I don't need a dumbed-down spreadsheet either. Numbers is a great start, but it needs to be beefed up.

[griffman]

"So, basically I'm wondering if the sluggishness with large tables is due to having formulas in each cell, or will tables of plain numbers also slow it down, and can it import txt files and do line graphs w/ data from a few columns?"
Well, I also tested large models that were a mix of text, numbers, and formulas, and they were also sluggish. But to test your setup, I just made a 20,000ish row, 52 column sheet with nothing but numbers in it. I created it in Excel, then tried to import it into Numbers. On my MacBook Pro, it said the file was "too large," even though the file was only 7MB and my machine has 2GB of RAM. On the Mac Pro with 4GB of memory, it imported, but took quite a while.
Once it was imported, I saved it out as a Numbers document, which then opened just fine (and more quickly) on the MacBook Pro. So clearly, something weird's going on with memory usage and Excel imports.
In any event, it took a couple seconds on the MacBook Pro to insert or delete a row from this large data file. It was, however, more responsive than my calculation-intensive test file. Creating a chart was nearly instant. Note that all I did was select a few rows, then click on the Chart button. I didn't tweak it in any way.
Best advice would be to download the free trial and see how it works for you.
-rob.