All entries for Friday 12 October 2007

Numbers vs Excel

Writing about web page http://www.apple.com/iwork

When I bought my shiny new Mac Book I also bought a copy of iWork 08, Apple’s equivalent of Office for the Mac. Let’s not beat about the bush, it doesn’t pretend to be a corporate productivity suite, it doesn’t pretend to be a hard core data manipulation tool interfacing to a million and one large scale corporate applications. It is a simple spreadsheet for people doing simple things at home and in the small office. I use Excel at work and it does what I need it too and it’s familiar. You can make excel do some pretty amazing things with Macros and I still think Office is arguably the second greatest range of products MS produce (Windows Server system with Exchange and SQL server comes first), but it’s a bit hardcore for what I do outside work and truth be told in work too. Thus I thought I’d give Numbers a try, since I already have a licence for Office 2004 for Mac I wasn’t losing anything by trying.

So on first impressions what do we have. Numbers has a very clean interface and a very slick interface. Someone who is not a hardcore spreadsheet-aholic was clearly consulted in the design process because formatting a cell and colouring it is much easier than in Excel. The disadvantage of this is of course that die hard Excel fans will look for things where they expect to find them and they have moved and it slows you down a little until you realise where things are located.

The sort/filter functions work somewhat differently to Excel but they are dynamic and only one click away. I did discover that if you ask it to filter for something in a large list of data in a huge sheet (5600 rows of data in 42 columns direct from SAP) then it can hang for a long time, something Excel doesn’t. The same can be said if you copy a row of filtered data and then try to insert paste it to the filtered list. If you do this it’s clever enough to know that you can’t just insert into a filtered field, and if you mistakenly pick insert column it will crash. I tried this on a table with 12 columns and 1000 rows to be sure too and sure enough there was a crash. The filters are smart and work differently but they aren’t as smart and controllable as Excel’s

Most formulae from Excel transfer over but custom formatting and some formulas won’t. Building your own simple formula is much easier for a non guru in Numbers. It even offers you the common formulas to build from all the time and the truth of it is most people do little more than add, subtract, average and count in Excel. Complex stuff and VBA is a no no though for obvious reasons already stated. General reading of excel files even those containing 18,000 lines of VBA is fine, though you get warned that it will not work with macros. Some of the complex graphs in Excel don’t work either, but you are warned about incompatibilities when opening the file.

The workspace in Numbers is rather radical because you grow the table to suit you, rather than using the stoic 65536 rows and columns up to IV that Excel 2000 gave. Grow it how you want and move things around like it’s a page in a DTP application. Your graphs are independent of the data sheet so you can lay those anywhere too. Multimedia support is as expected, excellent with easy adding of anything. The basic provided templates are also good for things like loan calculations, mortgage comparisons and the like. More useful than Excel’s anyway for home use.

So overall Numbers does exactly what it says on the tin and if you keep track of your accounts or something in Excel rather than paying MS more money and buying Office 2008 for Mac, give iWork a go as it will do everything the average user would want more easily than Excel can. On the other hand if you work at a serious accounting firm and in order to do your accounts you have VBA code out of your ears, stick with Excel 2003, it’s the superior tool technically. Or try Mathematica… now there’s a clever manipulation tool.

Christopher Hinds : 12 Oct 2007 00:34 |  Tags: Apple Excel Microsoft Software |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem