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I personally adore Pages and especially Numbers. I spend most of my professional life designing and dealing with spreadsheets and Numbers’ table-based paradigm
by qubex 4y ago
I personally adore Pages and especially Numbers.
I spend most of my professional life designing and dealing with spreadsheets and Numbers’ table-based paradigm is simply orders of magnitude more elegant that Excel’s everything-is-a-sheet approach. Why? I can modify tables (inserting row and columns, changing attributes, & cetera) without affecting other tables.
The one thing I miss and that infuriates me is Numbers’ lack of iterative solutions to circular references. Circular references are bad, you say, and I agree, but unfortunately in corporate finance they’re unavoidable when creating business plans because short-term debt depends on interest to be paid and interest to be paid depends on short-term debt. That means that Numbers can only take me so far until I have to export to .xlsx and then slog it out with Excel from then on. It’s a real pity they keep adding useless (to me) features such as collaborative editing and so forth when adding this functionality would take the whole application from being a toy to being a professional instrument.
One can hope, I guess.
- tomjen3 4y agoIn excel select the location of your table, select format as table and now you have a table that you can setup auto sum on, setup computed columns and automatically have everything extended when you add a new line. You can also use it as basis for a pivot table so excel can make you a much better overview of your data.
- qubex 4y agoThanks (no sarcasm) but I know how it works. My point was that in Excel this is an afterthought, whereas in Numbers it’s a consequence of how the application is devised from first principles.
- Someone 4y agoProblem: once you have multiple such tables on a sheet, adding and removing rows or columns to such tables becomes hit and miss. Numbers will happily shift down tables to make room, but Excel won’t. Array formulas are another sort-of alternative for Numbers’ tables, but there, too, the implementation could be better. You can’t insert a row ‘inside’ a range of rows covered by an array formula, for example.