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The wonderful Numbers
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Posted by MadaboutDana
May 5, 2011 at 09:45 AM
Okay, I’ve done it - I feel a little embarrassed, a little dirty, even a little childish. But yes, I’ve gone and got an iPad.
And promptly experimented with n billion apps, most of which are nowhere near as good as they appear at first sight.
But… in the process, I’ve discovered Numbers.
What an amazing application. It’s enough to make you want to change over to Mac just so you can use Numbers all the time.
It’s not a spreadsheet application at all. It’s a kind of business pasteboard - you can put more or less any kind of information on there, anywhere you want it. The spreadsheet ability is just the icing on the cake. It’s the equivalent of Microsoft OneNote for Mac - but much, much nicer to use (yes, I love the OneNote concept; no, I really don’t like the OneNote execution). The only thing it doesn’t appear to do (yet!) is audio recordings.
Why am I writing about Numbers in an outliner forum? For several reasons:
a) you can treat spreadsheet tables as outlines
b) you can create loads of tabs
c) the search tool searches every sheet in full (unlike the ghastly Excel)
From my point of view, it’s even more powerful because it’s relatively easy to share. Now that Apple have included WebDAV support in their iWorks apps, it’s easy to transfer Numbers documents as PDF or Excel files to a central server (you can also use e-mail, iDisk, iWorks.com as intermediaries). The Excel conversion is neat: it creates a summary sheet at the start of each workbook and creates a separate worksheet for each table (sadly the text elements and graphics appear to get lost, but I haven’t done much experimenting with that yet); the summary includes links to each separate worksheet.
There are other wonderful things on the iPad, including the lovely outliner CarbonFin (also shareable via web sync) and the neat, simple Wunderlist (ditto); both applications run on iPhone, too, so you can sync right across multiple platforms.
Actually, for all my mild embarrassment at succumbing to the Apple virus, the decision was carefully planned from a very business-oriented point of view. The impact on ease of collaboration with colleagues has already been startling, and we’re only just beginning to discover what you can do with this stuff.
I’m looking forward to Apple OS X Lion, which will turn every Mac into a server - using ReaddleDocs (or Air Sharing) you can turn your iPad into a WebDAV server already, which is also a great way to share info. This is a fascinating strategy for subverting the enterprise - rather than turning all workstations into thin clients, you turn all clients into mini-servers. Very, very bold.
Posted by MsJulie
May 5, 2011 at 11:24 AM
Congrats! Incidentally, if you’d like to see another reason to be glad you made the leap, look at this TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang///id/1134
Can’t say I’ve made the leap—but I know it’s coming. I’ve convinced myself to wait for the “next release.”
Posted by George Entenman
May 5, 2011 at 11:45 AM
This sounds fantastic, leading me to look around for templates or examples &c. for this sort of function. If there’s any way you could provide an example or template, I’d be very interested in knowing how you’re using numbers. I don’t have an iPad but assume you can do the same thing on a Mac?
Thanks for posting this.
—ge
Posted by MadaboutDana
May 5, 2011 at 12:16 PM
Yes, you can, Numbers on the Mac is much more powerful than Numbers on the iPad. The mistake is to think of Numbers as in any way equivalent to Excel - it isn’t, it works in a fundamentally different way. I use Excel frequently for business purposes, and I hate it. I’ve been keeping an eye on Numbers ever since it first came out for the Mac, because even in its first iteration it was clearly ground-breaking. Now that it’s been around for a while, it’s seriously impressive.
For Numbers on the Mac, I’d suggest checking out the Apple tutorials at http://www.apple.com/iwork/tutorials/#numbers
For Numbers on the iPad, check out http://www.apple.com/ipad/from-the-app-store/numbers.html
Even Apple hasn’t really emphasized the difference between Numbers and a standard spreadsheet application, although the above info on the iPad version does say the following: “Numbers isn?t just a spreadsheet application ? it?s a flexible canvas. Which means you can add multiple tables and charts anywhere on a sheet and move them wherever you like. Drag your finger on a table to add, delete, or move columns and rows. With a tap, enter and edit data. Use the full-screen summary view to see your data by the sum, min, max, and count for your selection. Then, with just a swipe, you can see a chart of how it all adds up.”
What they don’t mention is that you can also enter text (with full rich-text formatting), shapes (including lines, squares, circles, ovals etc.) and do all kinds of prettifying things to all of them: think of it more as a spreadsheet+notetaker+DTP+charting package. Oh, and then you can output it all as an elegant PDF, suitable for presentation to a board meeting/client. We’re using it - for example - to generate copy concepts for major international corporates. An additional benefit is that you can easily post your documents for team review to iWork.com (you are entitled to as soon as you acquire an Apple iWork app - apologies for previously misspelling that as iWorks, incidentally). Documents can be encrypted and password-protected, and team members can jot comments all over them, or download them as either Numbers or PDF or Excel files. Once OS X Lion appears, you’ll be able to do these things on your own Apple server.
Let’s be fair: Excel can do these things too, to an extent, but you never want to do them in Excel because the experience is so utterly ghastly (it’s just crashed on me yet again, even as I type!).
What it boils down to is this: Numbers is actually fun! And replaces any number of lesser applications (on the iPad and, I suspect, on the Mac) that only offer a portion of its features.
Posted by Captain CowPie
May 5, 2011 at 02:26 PM
I switched to a Mac in 2006 and have been extremely happy with the move. I only switched because my choice for a new PC was one with Vista, and Apple had just switched over to the Intel chips so I figured I could use Parallels or Boot Camp. But I never even put Windows on my Mac as the software selection was much better than I realized.
One of the best packages out there is iWork, and especially Numbers as you stated. Once I started using Numbers, I never went back to Excel. Being able to draw anything on the screen and resize and move it was a groundbreaking model, one that is not appreciated as much as it should be. Having said that, I have not used Numbers as MadaboutDana (thought it was MadaboutData at first glance) has indicated, but it does sound intriguing. I will have to play around with it a bit.
We just got the iPad 2 for my wife, and I guess I need to download the Numbers app right away. Quite a bargain in my opinion.
Apple is expected to update iWorks sometime soon, so hopefully we will get a plethora of new and exciting features.
Thanks for the great idea MadaboutDana. Much appreciated.
Vince