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Mac Numbers now supports LAMBDA functions and MAP
- robin_reala 1y agoI genuinely enjoy using Numbers in a way that I just don’t with Excel. Probably more indicative of the level I’m using it at, but for me it fills the gap where I just want to do some quick manipulations of CSV data but not enough that it’s worth writing a script.
- WillAdams 1y agoIt is _so_ close to being a replacement for Lotus Improv/Quantrix Financial Modeler/Flexisheet. Just held back by the need to import/export Excel files.
- oidar 1y agoIt does import/export Excel.
- WillAdams 1y agoYes, that is what precludes it being a Lotus Improv, et al. replacement, it is oriented towards a 2D structure, rather than requiring that the user tear off and label specific axes one at a time, which was what made Lotus Improv such a breakthrough app.
- isomorph 1y agoI'm also a Numbers fan. I actually like using Pages too. When I use Microsoft Office, I remember its power but I also find it relatively difficult to use.
- tzs 1y agoPages greatly confused me the first time I tried to use it, several years ago. That's because it included a bunch of templates for different kinds of documents, and when you created a new document from one of those templates the document was full of text and images. That text was Lorem ipsum [1]. I had never seen that before and assumed that I had somehow gotten the templates for some other language installed with my English Pages install. I then spent a few hours trying to figure out how to change template language settings or install English templates. I eventually copies some of the text and Googled it, hoping to find someone else who had this problem and had found the fix and then learned about Lorem ipsum. Nowadays when you create a document from the templates that come with Pages the placeholder text is in your language and is usage instructions for the template. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum
- czk 1y agoChatGPT killed Lorem Ipsum
- qsort 1y agoI use macOS and the rest of the pseudo-office suite. It's okay. But Numbers is just bad. It takes forever to open files and perform even trivial operations. I do a lot of data engineering and people's "creative" usage of Excel is the bane of my existence, but there's a reason why it's used everywhere: it's that good. None of the clones even hold a candle to the real thing.
- Synaesthesia 1y agoIt depends on your use case. I wouldn't use numbers for anything large or complex but it's really quite a pleasure for smaller things, like invoices or planning.
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y agoMy main use of Numbers is when I open a CSV file and it's messed up in Excel, I then open it in Numbers and export an Excel which fixes the issues.
- sgt 1y agoExcel is horrible. Functionality is great (it's packed with features), but it's just so clunky and slow. So I have to agree, Numbers feels like a light weight Excel that meets my demands as well.
- pbh101 1y agoIf you are using significant amounts of data, Excel even on Mac is light years ahead of Numbers I’ve found. And probably still slower than Excel on Windows. My experience was using pivot tables with 80k-100k rows and maybe 20 columns. Excel was instant and Numbers took dozens of seconds of UI completely frozen to update the table.
- diegof79 1y agoI like the feature allowing multiple tables to be in the same spreadsheet. It’s a convenient and obvious solution that, for some reason, Excel or Google Sheets don’t have. Does anybody know the history behind it? Is there any kind of patent around that UI feature that only Numbers (AFAIK) has?
- MartinMond 1y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv
- nhinck3 1y agoWith some functionality that differs to the tables in excel? Because you can have multiple tables in a single sheet in excel, but I guess the columns filters don't play nicely with multiple tables.
- diegof79 1y agoYes, it’s different from Excel tables. @wtallis probably explained it better, but I’ll give it another shot: A “spreadsheet” or tab in Numbers is like a canvas where you can put tables, text boxes, , charts or shapes. The classic spreadsheet is one of these table objects. If you want it to behave like a classic spreadsheet, you can have a single table object that takes the whole canvas; otherwise, you can have multiple. Each is like a spreadsheet with columns and rows; formulas can refer to cells in other tables. It’s handy to create dashboard-like views or visually organize your work. In other words, Excel tables are a special region in your spreadsheet; Numbers tables are individual spreadsheets on a canvas.
- kccqzy 1y agoGoogle Sheets does have this feature. But it was fairly recent. Numbers had it for a long time and in any case I still prefer the implementation in Numbers. In Numbers, data is referenced through these tables exclusively while getting rid of sheet-level references; tables in Google Sheets do not go that far. My mental model for tables in Numbers is just sheets but relocatable and multiple can be viewed at the same time. My mental model for tables in Sheets is just it helps me with formatting and with referencing the entirety of the data like an upgraded named range. https://support.google.com/docs/answer/14239833?hl=en https://support.google.com/docs/answer/14239833?hl=en
- alabastervlog 1y agoPretty much the entire suite of 1st party Apple programs are my favorite in their categories, across platforms. Their "office" apps remind me of the lightweight non-LibreOffice options on Linux, like Gnumeric and Abiword, but better integrated, less janky, and I've never once seen any of them crash. I like that I can forget I even have them open in the background, they're so light. Which should be the case for practically everything given how powerful modern computers are, but, unfortunately, Electron exists.
- pbh101 1y agoA really nice thing I noticed about Pages is that if you use the defaults, your document turns out very nicely typeset with zero extra effort, at least to my untrained eyes. Which you’d expect from Apple and maybe any word processor, but I can’t say I’ve had that baseline experience with others.
- kstrauser 1y agoSame for me. I cringe when I have to resort to MS Office to deal with some janky external doc or another. Excel has a gazillion functions. Numbers has less coverage, but it implements them pleasantly in a Mac-assed Mac app. Same with Pages vs Word. I'm sure has power features some people can't live without. I can live without ‘em, in exchange for getting an ergonomic app that runs nicely on my OS. I'd reach for Pages every time over Word, which, ironically, in my opinion is not very good at processing words. (99% of the time I use iA Writer in a Markdown workflow. If I specifically need WYSIWYG for something, it’s Pages every time.)
- c0nsumer 1y agoSame here. For just knocking up models of stuff I find it both nicer than Excel (and included with the OS) and works... better... for me than Google Sheets. It's just convenient and works.
- ZeroCool2u 1y agoJust occurred to me that I've no idea what Numbers even looks like, because it's always been hard blocked on my corporate MacBook.
- spiffyk 1y agoI just learned of Numbers' existence, as I haven't seriously used a MacBook ever, but I'm curious, why would they block it?
- SSLy 1y agopeople saving work as .numbers instead of MSFT's formats.
- ZeroCool2u 1y agoGreat question, but I'd probably have to try it to have a good answer!
- jwhiles 1y agoI was briefly terrified this was Lambda in the AWS sense
- lazystar 1y agowhys that?
- badlibrarian 1y agoThat's sort of how Python works in Excel. You can insert Python code into a cell, but it runs in the cloud. No option (yet) to keep it local. They're nuts. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/introduction-to-python-in-excel-55643c2e-ff56-4168-b1ce-9428c8308545 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/introduction-to-p...
- friendzis 1y agoIf I follow the link I am brought to extremely generic Apple support page with exactly zero indication that we are talking about the Numbers app. How do you determine, from this support article, the scope where it applies?
- reader9274 1y agoIt's about formulas. Click on Table of Contents --> Welcome, and you'll see "Use formulas and functions in tables in the iWork apps—Numbers, Keynote, and Pages"
- praestigiare 1y agoI mostly don't use Numbers for very much because it's not easy to share and collaborate. Everyone has Excel. Everyone has Sheets. That said, I routinely use it as a first step in converting CSV and other text based delimited data. Open or paste into Numbers and it almost always does a perfect job of determining columns when Sheets and Excel choke.
- MartinMond 1y agoAll it's missing is a constraint solver
- mritchie712 1y agoI've used Numbers as my todo list for about a decade now. I've tried other things, but I've always come back to it. I have a table with: * name * priority * DUE * status * notes And a formula that sorts based on due / priority. Typing "done" in status removes it with a filter.
- username135 1y agoNot caffeinated enough. I thought the title was referring to mac addresses and I was really wondering how that would work.
- asplake 1y agoDo they have SPLIT and JOIN also? I have long wished for those in Excel
- soegaard 1y agoDanes: Feel free to give this bug report an upvote. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256032425 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256032425
- MobileVet 1y agoNumbers looks wonderful, but for deep business needs it has a LONG way to go before it is at all comparable. It is great they are adding functionality, but I am curious what market segment they think they are meeting? We just broke down and bought a Windows based machine because MS Excel is so limited on a Mac that it was forcing our accountant into time wasting inefficiencies and general hair pulling.
- dijit 1y agoI know that you must have assessed LibreOffice Calc at some point. What were the sticking points that made it unviable? I have had people in my org who are terrified of running Calc over Excel due to compatibility with other organisations- but I wasn’t aware that it was functionally incomplete as a competitor.
- northisup 1y ago"Mac Numbers"
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- daft_pink 1y agoI really wish Numbers was fully Excel compatible and I could get rid of this Microsoft spyware nonsense. I even bought WP Office, but even that tries to force you into their cloud drive. I really wish there was a fully compatible Microsoft Office that I could use across my Apple devices that doesn’t shove some random cloud solution and end up with my files spread all over the place. I would pay more to have a OneDrive less office.
- cadamsdotcom 1y agoIt won’t be 100% compatible for everyone, but LibreOffice - with OneDrive connected via an app that exposes your shares’ contents as files - might work. Worth a try at least.