MacResearch

Now that iWork 08 is officially released, we thought we'd take our fellow MacResearchers on a quick (very quick) tour of Numbers. The new spreadsheet application that is part of the iWork suite of programs. This isn't an exhaustive review, but I wanted to get some first impressions out for those that might be curious. Ask questions for specific information if you have them and I'll try and take a look as time permits.

The tour starts with the install and registration and the new HUD type look of the registration window.

Once loaded, Numbers greets you with a little splash screen introducing you to the application and offering to take you to view some video tutorials

For those who don't see too well, the address for the tutorials is:

http://www.apple.com/iwork/tutorials

For the first look, I chose to use one of the Apple predefined templates. There are a number of them ranging from basic spreadsheets to complex, sheets with images, shapes and charts.

The chart I chose was the Personal Budget. And from the beginning you can tell this isn't Excel. It looks and feels very Mac like. You'll notice the Keynote/Pages like toolbar. And the Source List on the right hand side, similar to many of the other iApps, that Apple ships. You can change the style on the fly (as in Keynote). And sections are managed like assets via an outline view.

When editing an are of the spread sheet, the column header and identifiers appear on demand. This is nice, as the screen isn't cluttered with grid lines (unless you want it to be) or broken up by the column sections headers.

There control palette where you can modify the various properties of you spreadsheet, including text, charts, spacing, hyperlinks and quicktime is similar to the palettes in Keynote and Pages.

Same with the media assets

Ok... so how does Numbers deal with actual Excel files. I asked someone for an Excel file that was huge. Unfortunately she only had one that was about 245k. So it's the best I could do.

Immediately on import Numbers let's me know that there are some "issues"

Looking at the warnings most of the import problems appear to deal with features or attributes in Excel that Numbers doesn't support (none of them are deal breakers). The import took about 5 seconds on my system (see below where I talk about app performance).

BUT... one thing I did notice is that the background of the table turned black (its white in Excel) and the text remained black. So that needed to be fixed.

Standard mathematical operations are easily accessed via a drop down. And Numbers will apply that operation on whatever you have selected in the window.

And of course there are quite a few options for plotting as well.

Numbers also supports exporting the document to PDF, Excel and CSV Format.

Now, there is one big issue I did notice with the application...Performance. On my Dual 2.5GHz G5 with 8 GB of RAM, the program came to a screeching halt after importing the Excel file (note the Excel file was created in Office 07, saved as an Office XP Excel Document, on Windows). Every operation I tried to perform took several seconds. This behavior did not occur when I worked with native Numbers files. I haven't investigated this much, and it may simply have to do with the spreadsheet I was given. But for those who have a lot of Excel spreadsheets, if this is a general problem, it may be an issue for you.

Pro's so far:

- Very Mac like
- Intuitive
- Easy to layout items and create complex and rich documents
- Supports import of Microsoft Excel Documents

Con's so far:

- Performance on imported Excel docs (again, I've only tested one, this is a quick tour, not an exhaustive review)