

The charts created by Numbers look beautiful, but advanced users who need features such as error bars will be disappointed by their absence. A nifty capability lets you add controls to individual cells so someone using the spreadsheet can choose a value from a pop-up menu you've prepopulated or adjust a value by dragging a slider or clicking on up/down arrows-effects that are clunky and difficult to set up in Excel, but effortless in Numbers.Īmong the 150 functions Numbers tables support, I found all I'm ever likely to need, but advanced and corporate users will be disappointed to find no equivalent of Excel's PivotTables for multiple views of the same data. Numbers shades the top row and left column of a table by default and treats them as labels.

For example, you can click on the corner of a Numbers table and move or resize it to leave room for anything else. Paneling to the left of the sheet shows a tree view that lists the objects on the page, and you can create multisheet files just as in traditional spreadsheet programs.- Next: By the NumbersĪ blank Numbers document looks like a traditional spreadsheet, but that's an illusion.

Unlike an Excel spreadsheet-essentially a grid with formulas in each cell-a Numbers document is a canvas that contains a many or as few tables, charts, graphics, text, or almost anything else as you care to add, in a layout that's easy to tweak. Thanks to the graphics-canvas architecture of iWork, Numbers is the most significant new idea in spreadsheets in two decades.

It works better than any corresponding feature I've seen in high-end graphics programs. The most impressive graphics option, Instant Alpha, lets you click on the background of an image and drag the mouse to selected color regions that you want to remove from the image so that only the foreground object is visible. A context-sensitive Format Bar displays common formatting options suitable to whatever is currently selected-text, a graphic, or a table. At the top you'll find a toolbar in which most icons have drop-down options. Apple's suite can import Microsoft Office documents, including those created in Office 2007, and can export to the Office 97-2003 format, which Office 2007 can read.Īll iWork applications use a common interface. Unlike the freeware and NeoOffice, iWork isn't an Office clone but a true alternative to Office-a graphics-centric suite in which all three programs are built on the same foundation, and all three are essentially graphics applications in which you position objects such as text, spreadsheet tables, and presentation slides on a drawing canvas. A brand-new spreadsheet program called Numbers joins new versions of the Pages word-processor and Keynote presentation package to create a low-priced alternative to the trio of Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.
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With iWork '08, Apple finally offers a software suite that presents Microsoft Office with a serious challenge for dominance on the Macintosh desktop.
