Guest Post :: Numbers Review

August 16, 2007

This guest post was written by Arjun Muralidharan, the mind behind Cup of Chai.

As most of you will know, Apple announced a new application last Tuesday called “Numbers”, which will fill in the gap of a spreadsheet application in the iWork suite.

I’ve been toying around with it for a few days, and here are my thoughts.

First Impressions

The interface of Numbers is strongly familiar; they use the standard “iTunes-interface”. A Numbers document can hold several sheets which in turn are organized nicely by tables and charts in the sources list, thus making it easy to see everything that’s in your workbook.

Numbers looks stunning. At first, it just seems like a redesigned Microsoft Excel. The handling of tables is ridiculously easy thanks to the handles that fade in and out if you select one. Applying new styles is just a click away, and creating one by yourself takes less than two minutes to do.

The new formatting bar at the top of the screen is a welcome addition across all iWork apps, as it reduces the use of the inspector, which always seemed a clunky goose-hunt to me.

Charts

I want to talk more about this because I’ve always had a headache making charts in Excel. They always look bad, use the wrong data, and make it hard to format legends and set data series’.

Numbers changes this. Charts are always bound to a table, so to create one, first choose the table, then create a chart from the menu atop. Once the chart appears, if you highlight it, Numbers brings up a “black glass” HUD over the table it detains to.

In this interface, you can quickly adjust colors, change the data range (by dragging the blue box) and invert which data is displayed on the x-axis or y-axis, which is a huge deal to me.

Formatting

What are the most common needs when formatting spreadsheets? To me, they are:

• Vertical (and horizontal) alignment of text
• Easy to enter formulae
• Fill colors, margins, borders
• Proper text wrapping and hyphenation

Numbers fulfills all brilliantly but for the last one, which doesn’t use hyphenation rules to wrap text. Frustrating.

Conclusions

Numbers is what you’d expect from an iWork app. It has all the standard amenities, like a media browser, good graphics support, a simple interface that expands to your needs. For the home and education user, Numbers will be a great welcome. Even in a small business, Numbers can help out. But I’ve been told that Numbers has similar performance issues with large files as Pages or Keynote have, and the more professional your spreadsheet gets, to quicker you will reach Numbers’ limitations.

Buy it? For $79, it’s a steal.

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[tags]Apple,Mac,Software,iWork,Numbers[/tags]

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