Apple's Numbers: Innovative, User-Friendly Spreadsheet Application

I downloaded the iWork '08 trial application, and have just started playing with Numbers. I've used Excel for about 20 years (I actually used the original Macintosh version 1.0 before it got ported to Windows in 1995), and I have to say, in Numbers, Apple (AAPL) demonstrates that there's actually quite a bit of innovation that can be done with the basic spreadsheet application.

click to enlarge

The image above is actually an Excel spreadsheet I use for forecasting Apple earnings (this is an old one, by the way). I've selected row 19 on the spreadsheet to look at my projection of iPod unit sales. When I made that selection, I discovered my favorite feature so far is in the bottom left-hand corner of the sheet/style pane.

Here's a quick blow-up:

In Excel, if I wanted to know how many units I had projected for those two years, I'd have to find a spare cell and insert a sum formula there. But in Numbers, just by selecting the cell, I get the sum and average right there on the page: I projected 115,000 iPods over two years, an average of 14,381 a quarter. It may not sound like much, but when you've got a client on the phone asking for an answer, it's so nice when software anticipates what questions you might reasonably ask.

Another feature I'm rather excited by is the ability to send a spreadsheet, table, or graph to iWeb for publishing. At present, my process for doing that is to either export a Web image from Excel (which looks awful, generally), or to craft tables by hand in HTML. If I can actually get to the point where Numbers and iWeb generate my blogging tables for me, I will be using this application all the time.

Now Numbers is no speed demon on my 4-year-old Titanium G4 Powerbook. But to be fair, neither are Word, or Excel. I've been using both Pages, and Keynote more this year here at Blackfriars to achieve our year-long mission of "better documents faster." Already, our default for presenting is now Keynote because it just looks more professional, and 90% of our documents now get produced in Pages, and are then exported to Word. Numbers now makes it likely we'll be doing the same with spreadsheets, simply because it saves us time, which turns into money. And with these programs able to import and export Office 2007 files - something that Microsoft Office on the Mac doesn't even do yet - iWork '08 is starting to look like a gotta-have-it app.

UPDATE: Astute reader Adam Daniel noted that Excel actually has such a feature down in its status line. If you select a range of cells, a "Sum=" appears and gives you the sum of the cells. If you click on that item, you can select Average, Count, and other statistics, although you can only show one at a time. It's a great example of a how different the two user interfaces and experiences are. Sum= is a feature I've seen in Excel for more than 20 years, and never understood or used, while the corresponding feature in Numbers was obvious, and I used it within the first 10 minutes of playing with it.

Comments

[rennard:]

...and in Numbers you can drag those 'sum', 'avg' tags and drop them into your spreadsheet - instant forumula.

2007 Aug 09 05:00 PM

[kindwarrior:]

Back in the days of free market software, there was a company named Cassedy &amp; Greene (Cassedy may be misspelled) that created a product called "SpreadSheet 2000" for the MacOS; It was an ingenious concept you had a canvas (actually you could have multiple canvases and layers) that you added tables, buttons text or other draw objects (ovals, bursts, squares, etc). The tables could be sized and styled independently and cells, rows, columns (or indeed) whole tables could be referenced in other tables by option dragging from the source to the destination. Borrowing a metaphor from Apple's OpenDoc a line would stretch from the source to the destination, if for some reason the connection could not be made the line would retreat back to the source with an animated failing about to communicate to the user that the connection had failed. Spreadsheet 2000 was really a delight to use and I was surprised how much less stressful it was to play around with independent tables than it was to worry about how to format my spreadsheet so that formulas would break should I decide to add a banner (among other minor stress inducing issues regarding formatting on one big grid). Sadly, it lacked many key features (most annoyingly there was no way to turn off the border around tables) and so in my mind it was nothing more than a very successful proof of concept -- it's good to see the idea come back. <b>

An interesting aside: Spreadsheet 2000 was written in an obscure programming language called Prograph which was a total departure from other programming languages; I experimented with Prograph; It took a while to get accustomed to the metaphor: inputs were represented as nodes (little circles) at the top of a project window, outputs as little circles at the bottom processes were little hexagonal icons that you dragged into the window and connected to inputs and outputs. The right side (I may have this reversed) of the hexagon could be double clicked to show the processes methods (the definitions of it's inputs and outputs) the double clicking the other side opened up a project window for that process -- and that's all there was to the language. It was impossible to make a syntax error in Prograph since you were just dragging lines and icons around. Inputs and outputs could auto-validate while connecting them (can't connect a string output to a number input). The language was intrinsically multi-threaded (in fact, you needed to draw a special connecting line if and I/O connection could not be allowed to be executed in parallel with other processes -- because, perhaps it needed data from another process that may or may not have executed). I have been convinced since working with Prograph that it is the right way to build programs but, like Spreadsheet 2000 it was never widely adopted therefore the libraries were small which probably meant you'd end up having to use some other language in conjunction with Prograph to get anything meaningful done so the technology languished. The 90s was a period where Microsoft prospered by breaking emerging standards. If you knew some Microsoft engineers during that time then you've surely heard the "Embrace and destroy" joking comments or, my favorite, "It ain't done 'til Lotus won't run" although that dates me. What this meant to the small emerging developer's like Cassedy and Greene and Peregrine (the makers of Prograph) was that they could not afford the endless revision cycles necessary to keep their tools running on the shifting sands that were the underlying standards of the '90s let alone advance the quality of their products. Ultimately they died.<b>

I'm cautiously hopeful about Apple's iWork suite, Google’s web productivity suite and the open source projects that are trying to compete with Microsoft now. Microsoft can no longer "own" the standards and people are innovating again. Having worked with the Newton, OpenDoc, Spreadsheet 2000, and Prograph, I cannot help but wonder what marvelous tools we would have now if we had somehow prevented the Microsoft monopoly. It has been my life lesson from my involvement in the industry that even while governments, and banks and Financial houses love monopolies (and monopolies need all three to exist) the free market doesn't and ultimately, the way water breaks a boulder, free markets tear monopolies apart. None of this of course erases the damage they do during their reign.

2007 Aug 09 07:43 PM

[Tom B:]

I recall that is the company that Apple bought the prototype for iTunes from. They also made the fun game, Glider Pro (2D scroller with paper airplanes avoiding hazards)..

I thought the spreadsheet was called KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid), but they may have upgraded the name.

2007 Aug 10 08:29 AM

[kindwarrior:]

You have to love wikipedia

I remember "Glider Pro" it was written by a fellow HyperCard developer "John Calhoon". Your reference made me do some web research. John did in fact sell the game to Casady &amp; Green (and yes I did misspell it above). There's an article on the game here.
<b>
This caused my to search for "Spreadsheet 2000" and, sure enough, there's an article here (with a screen shot and a mention of Prograph)

The Prograph link will take you here where you can learn that the idea of prograph is not entirely dead. According to the article BTW the author of Prograph was Pictoius not Peregrine -- I may simply have been wrong here but something vague in my memory is telling me that there's more to the story.

2007 Aug 11 02:48 PM