Tim Flight

Of the Apple announcements yesterday, the one I was most excited about was the addition of Numbers, a spreadsheet program, to the iWork suite. Finally, an Apple spreadsheet app. (Unless of course you remember back to AppleWorks.)

So I gladly downloaded the 30 day trial to see if Numbers can replace Excel. I had high hopes, but I also recognize I’m a bit of an Excel power-user. The verdict? I don’t think I’ll be able to make the switch. After I installed Numbers, I asked it to import an Excel spreadsheet I use daily. After a few minutes of thinking, a seemingly stalled progress bar, and the infamous spinning beach-ball, I was presented with the following message:

Import Warning - Sorting criteria were removed.
Import Warning - Charts with error bars or trendlines were converted to charts without error bars or trendlines.
Import Warning - Chart references to external data aren’t supported and the last values were imported.
Import Warning - Major and minor axis range units were recalculated and your charts might look different.
Import Warning - Minimum and maximum axis values were recalculated and your charts might look different.
Import Warning - Chart axes were moved to cross at chart corners. Chart “eCPM” will look different.
Import Warning - Unsupported conditional formatting on 43 cells was removed from Table 1 on “Salary.”
Import Warning - Unsupported formulas in 2 cells were removed from Table 1 on “Daily Forecast.” The last calculated value was used.
Import Warning - Unsupported conditional formatting on 2 cells was removed from Table 1 on “Daily Forecast.”
Import Warning - Unsupported conditional formatting on 1112 cells was removed from Table 1 on “Daily Total.”

Yikes. Thinking things might not be as bad as that sounds, I decided to take a poke around. Where did all of my panes go? How do I know the title of my column if it is longer than my window size? Where did my trendlines on my charts go? How come I have entire charts that are now blank, with no data in them? I can’t extend a row and keep the formulas? I can’t change the marker icon? Even after saving the document in the Numbers native format the document takes more than 60 seconds to open?

Hopefully I’ll find ways to get around those issues, or I’ll find where those features are hidden, but it doesn’t sound like I’ll be able to ditch Excel.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 11:57 am and is filed under Computer Technology, General. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.