Working with Numbers ’08
Today I had a little time to work a bit with Numbers from iWork '08. I had a spreadsheet worked up in Mesa that I wanted to convert to Numbers and see what it'd look like and how easy it would be to get it copied in and looking the way I wanted it to look. I was really pleasantly surprised that getting the graphs working was as easy as it was. I expected the data transfer to go smoothly - after all, it's just cut-'n-paste, but adding in the graphs was going to be a test as there was a lot of data there to graph and Mesa, for instance, had a harder time than I expected getting it all plotted properly.
I was a little disappointed in the fact that there weren't two-level column headers available in Numbers. I'm sure they can be created by making two rows look like headers and then have the top row of cells span multiple columns, but I'd have thought that Apple would have allowed multiple headers. Slightly disappointing, but still, not the worst thing to happen - just something to work around.
I was very pleased with the page layout and the multiple pages in a workbook. This feature has Excel and Mesa beat, hands-down. While it may be trivial to the Excel wizard, as I've seen them remove the row/column outlines and draw borders to make it look like the table (or tables) are on a blank white sheet of paper, this allows you to really do it. Also, it was a very pleasant surprise to see that dragging a table or graph from one sheet to another was possible without any change in the naming of the cells in formulas. This is something that Excel fails at, and while it's possible to get around, it's nice to be able to build up something and then drag one object off a page onto another after things are all built up.
I'd love to see tabs in the GUI tools - say, being able to drop down a tabbed interface on the page and then add tabs and drop content on them. It's a microcosm of the pages, I suppose, so it's not terribly important, but it'd be nice in the few things I was doing, but again, not a show-stopper.
After just about an hour of working with it, I'd have to say that I can't imagine that there's something I'll need it to do that I wish I had Excel for. My needs are relatively simple, and the capabilities in Numbers is really quite amazing. I'm very glad I got iWork '08.