"Apple's iWork '08 boasts improvements to the software suite's word processing and presentation applications, but - more importantly - it fills the suite's spreadsheet hole with Numbers. eWEEK Labs ran Numbers through its paces, and found it to be a strong addition to the productivity software market and a promising alternative to Microsoft Excel."
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Member since:2005-11-15
Member since:2005-10-12
I haven't used Numbers, but the typical thing that happens with spreadsheets to make their use problematical in business is speed and scale. The question is, how fast it runs (if at all) with multiple sheets in a workbook with several thousand lines and a few hundred rows, all interrelated.
Now, you could say, and its perfectly true, that this is not the right tool for the job. Learn yourself a real language if you want to do this sort of stuff, and stop messing with spreadsheets. Use a database. True.
But in fact, like it or not, Finance departments and planning departments are going to keep on using spreadsheets, and if they can't get their stuff to work at acceptable speed, they will howl, and they will get what they want.
OO is just about acceptable. But neither KSpread nor Gnumeric will handle the large ones. And even OO is fairly easy to bring to its knees if you use the wrong kinds of formulas.
It would be interesting to hear how Numbers performs on this kind of thing. Throw in a few largish array formulas to the above mix, do some regex in your formulas, and see how long it takes to load and recalculate.
I'm no great admirer of MS, MS Office or even Excel. But its fast. Or at least, its fast enough.
Member since:2005-07-06
I would say the vast majority of "corporate users" never use a given office application to its full potential. MS Office applications have tons of features that I would never use. That, however, does not mean there are no power users who DO use and even NEED some of those additional functions.
It might also come down to finances (but I don't know this, talking out of my butt here) since we have some sort of "corporate licensing scheme" with MS or some intermediate provided of MS software, we can insure smooth interoperability between users at a reduced cost that might not make the less expensive, but less functional Numbers more attractive in the end.
Member since:
2006-01-04
I'm wondering. What exactly about Numbers makes it unfit for corporate use? I'm an advanced maths, physics and programming student, and I'm finding it fine for my work barring one relatively minor problem; that is, you can't link scatter graph points with lines.
For a corporate user this actually seems quite good. All the statistical and basic maths functions of Excel coupled with great layout and visual functions, which business documents seem to be far too concerned with.
Additionally, it has sliders and so on for easy interaction when giving a spreadsheet to the upper management; they can just move the slider and see the graph updated in realtime. It seems to be reasonably good at importing XLS documents.
As far as the numbers file format goes, I'm not sure, however it seems to be a gzipped XML inside the package, using namespaces defined by Apple (can't find one, but I assume there's or will be a spec somewhere). I think they released documentation for other iWork apps... Some APXL presentation layer or something. There doesn't appear to be scripting support yet, but with other iWork apps they released that in an update afterwards.