I recently played around with Numbers, a spreadsheet program included in Apple’s iWork. The program’s layout is similar to Pages with a row of “primitives” and a Format bar just beneath. Also similar to Pages are a bunch of templates to tweak, the Inspector, and compatibility with iLife. So this overview is a bit shorter and contain features unique to Numbers.

Tables

For starters, the main purpose of getting numbers into a spreadsheet is to do calculations. When multiple cells are selected, a small column in the lower left corner appears, displaying some common calculations like sum, average, etc.

What’s kind of slick is if you want to display the results of one of these operations in your table, just drag and drop the appropriate blue oval over to a cell.

If you prefer traditional equations you can type them in in the area just beneath the format bar.

When a table is selected, “grippy bars” appear in the upper left corner and right and bottom edges of the first row and column. The upper left corner can be used to reposition a table, while dragging the edge bars adds more rows or columns.

Table cells can be formatted in the expected ways with various fonts, alignment, border widths, and colors. You can also attach different interface elements for easier input of values. With a cell selected, call up the Inspector, and click on Cells. Under “Cell format” is a drop down menu with some choices labeled stepper, slider, and drop down.

These choices set graphic elements to appear when the cell is selected, allowing data to be easily entered. This might helpful if you hand your spreadsheet over to someone else to edit, as the values can be limited to a range of numbers or several choices.

Sheets and Templates

A Numbers document is called a “sheet” and can be filled with several tables and graphic elements such as text, charts, and images. They’re all displayed in the left column. One look at some of the provided templates shows the benefits of this approach. You can definitely create some very graphically appealing charts which don’t even resemble a spreadsheet.

Printing

Another feature worth mentioning is a print preview mode so you can determine if parts of your document are going to end up broken onto multiple pages. In this mode you can scale the entire document using a slider and easily rearrange elements.

Conclusion

At home, our need for a spreadsheet program is rather limited (we use Quicken for finances) – so Numbers isn’t really necessary – but Excel is definitely overkill. I don’t think I’d use Numbers very much, but after playing with it for a while, I wish I could. That’s actually how I feel about many Apple applications – I can see myself inventing projects just so I have an excuse to use them.

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Posted In: Apple

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