[Art Vandelay]

I spy a new spreadsheet app coming with iWork '08.



It's to the right of the Pages icon in the Dock.

[Art Vandelay]

...and it's called Numbers.

[rickey939]

w00t!

[TheoCryst]

Can I get a hell f***ing yes?

[real]

Sure theo, Have at it.

Looks cool. I hope that it can really take on excel.

[Mediaman_12]

Originally Posted by Art Vandelay 

...and it's called Numbers.

Apple info here

[peeb]

I'm just installing it....

[Douglashh]

If you have AppleWorks can you import an AW spreadsheet with Numbers?

[peeb]

It supports appleworks 6.

[peeb]

It looks pretty cool. I mean, it's a spreadsheet. But it's beautiful.

[Mithras]

I haven’t gotten to play with it yet, but it certainly looks like an interesting app.
The notion of a blank canvas with specific tables dropped into it certainly makes sense.

The rigmarole of laying out a bunch of little bordered regions in an Excel sheet, then making named ranges, etc. etc. is a little tired. Of course, casual users don’t have to worry much about this, because of the intelligent tracking on cut-and-paste and so on.

Nonetheless I think Apple’s correctly identified that for most people, the reason one column of numbers is in B10:B40, and another in F15:G47, is about formatting rather than any logical relation...

[Horsepoo!!!]

Been testing the 30-day trial and this thing puts Excel to shame.

Excel is, what, on its 20th version? Numbers is on its first version and blows Excel away like Keynote blew PowerPoint away.

Excel is still more powerful in some sense. But its power is very niche. I can count the people I know that make intricate macros on one hand. Numbers, on the other hand, isn't frightening. It's actually going to lure people that were afraid of spreadsheets to it.

Microsoft sucks...I can't believe Apple is trouncing Microsoft at its own game...AGAIN! This is a sad day for Microsoft. I mean, Office is MS' bread and butter.

[freudling]

Horespoo!!!

You are so right. Numbers is fxxking awesome. I have not been this excited about an app for a while. And the new versions of Pages and Keynote... awesome. Man, things are really evolving. With Leopard, computing is just going to be so amazing. I am totally addicted to my Mac. Everyone, all business people, this is THE suite of apps we have all been waiting for.

Drop your crappy, universal Account Edge and other finance programs. Numbers is just remarkable. It is so nice to be able to move your spreadsheet around on a canvas and take complete control of the layout. It opens the door to making your layout and data make much more sense. You can tell they really put a lot of work into this. For a first release, just... awesome.

Oh, track changes in Pages!

[kcmac]

I have been test driving numbers as well and I can't agree more with you. This makes the latest office look so lame and lazy. There are just so many nice and intuitive touches going on here.

The MacBU is now rethinking january 08. Maybe January 09....

[alex_kac]

A few questions on Numbers. I don't use 99% of Excel's features but I do use a few things:

1) Is there a SubTotals feature? This is where you take say a sales CSV report you get from a distributor with 10000 items and simply select the whole dang thing, select "SubTotals" in the menu and you tell it to group everything by Column C (Product Name or ID) and subtotal everything in Column G (Royalty). It then takes the existing info and simply groups and sub-totals each group so I can see how much each product sold easily.

2) Well that's it. I only use Excel for that one thing.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by freudling 

Drop your crappy, universal Account Edge and other finance programs. Numbers is just remarkable.

Uh…what? Numbers isn't a bookkeeping app. It doesn't do invoices, account management or payroll.

[freudling]

Chuckit:

I should have qualified my statement. I have a business, and looked for the killer app for accounting. I tried about a dozen or more accounting programs for the Mac: Inuit's crap, Account Edge, several others from Apple's download page. I hated them all. I ended up just designing my own custom spreadsheet complete with the formulas I needed. This from the advice of an accountant in London who really summed it up. He made the point of how accounting programs suck, because they are shoe box solutions that offer the user far too many options that they will never use.

Case in point. If you walk into any finance/economics department in major companies/governments, it is almost a given that you will never see these shoe box accounting programs. They use SAS, Excel and a few others. If you are serious about accounting, you won't use Account Edge and the like.

That is my point.

[freudling]

Oh and payroll, people write their own programs for that.