Review: Numbers ‘09
- Article 66 of 89
- MacFormat, March 2009
iWork's youngest member looks good, but it has a little way to go before it matches Excel
Numbers is the new kid on the block in iWork. The equivalent of Excel in Microsoft Office, it's a spreadsheet package designed to make working with figures and then presenting the results as simple as possible. The differences between Excel and Numbers reflect their ages and intents. While Excel is a powerhouse of ready-reckoning, designed from the start to be a calculation workhorse, with presentation something of an after-thought, Numbers is an offshoot of Keynote, where presentation is everything and raw power the runner up.
So it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that most of the new features in this second version of Numbers are to do with presentation. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, since anyone who's ever used Excel for any period of time knows that as well as being less than intuitive to use, its graphics capabilities are significantly lacking, making export to another program a necessity, even once charts and graphs have been created.
While most of the interface remains identical from iWork '08, there's a new template chooser to match Keynote's when the program launches, with another eight new templates to choose from. While these are undoubtedly stylish, their usefulness is often debatable and show minimum 'translation' from the American originals beyond switching £ for $. At best, they're examples of what can be achieved with Numbers, rather than templates you can apply to your own situation or business.
The only other immediately obvious change is the ubiquitous iWork '09 Share menu. Here, the old Send to iWeb and Export commands make their way over to join the new Send via Mail and iWork.com-related commands, Send via Mail being a simple way to email your spreadsheet in Numbers, Excel or PDF format.
Where you'll find the biggest changes is in 2D charts where you'll now be able to combine line, column, and area series in a single mixed chart; create two-axis charts with different value scales; and apply trendlines and error bars - nothing revolutionary compared to Excel's stats-mad powers, but welcome and attractive additions nevertheless. Also in the "you've seen it somewhere else before list", charts and tables are now properly embeddable in Keynote presentations and Pages documents using simple copy and paste: if you make changes in your Numbers document, the embeddable graphics will alter to match the changes with a simple mouse-click, even if you've changed the fonts and styles.
Spreadsheets can be a pain to navigate as they get larger, with things like split screens and pane freezing doing little to alleviate the misery in any program, so Numbers' new categorisation functions for tables are welcome. You can now group rows into categories, which each category including a summary row. You can you use this to collapse, expand, and rearrange the categories. You can also add functions, such as subtotals and averages, to each summary row. Seen it before? Yes, but it's well implemented and useful nevertheless.
More innovative and probably more useful is a Formula List view, accessible from a button in the toolbar. This adds a pane to the current window containing a list of all the calculations performed by the spreadsheet to make it obvious what's happening. You can find and/or replace values and formulae in your spreadsheet, and can also click on anything dubious and be taken to the relevant cell to fix it.
Fortunately, Apple hasn't forgotten that there might be some users who want to use Numbers for more than checklists and home inventories. It's more than doubled the number of calculation functions in Numbers from 100 to over 250 - not quite up there with Excel's, so if you're a big fan of financial functions like COUPNCD, prepare to work them out from scratch, even on spreadsheets you've imported from Excel.
More importantly, Apple hasn't ignored usability while adding this power. The formula browser now gives you a far greater explanation of what each formula does and you can add placeholder values for variables to give you a better idea of what happens.
There's now enough power in Numbers that only the real number-cruncher will feel short-changed by it. It's still something of a slacker when compared with Excel, with pivot tables still nothing more than a glimmer in Apple's eye at best. But even the worst chart it ever produces is still going to be leagues better than Excel's best efforts.