Studio Rockstar

A few weeks ago, Apple released a much needed update to their iWork and iLife suites. The most important update to iWork for me was the addition of a spreadsheet-like program called Numbers. I spent a few nights porting my revenue and expenses over to Numbers and all I can say is: wow.

I’m a huge fan of spreadsheets, and also a perfectionist when it comes to design and layout. This is the exact kind of program I absolutely love to use. It gives me the simple power I need from spreadsheets, and the beauty I get from creating documents in Illustrator or Photoshop. Have a look at my master spreadsheet I use to keep track of my revenue month-to-month:

The primary reason I think this program is so revolutionary is that it realizes that most people only use the basics in spreadsheets. 95% of the spreadsheet work I do is just adding up numbers, averaging out numbers, and creating simple graphs to visualize the data. It dumbs down the complexity that is Excel and gives everyone a simple interface to do their simple calculations.

The second reason I love this program so much is that it makes it really easy to create great looking spreadsheets. You just need to select one of the table or chart templates in the sidebar, and suddenly your tables are formatted nicely with headers, cells, and summary rows and columns. Excel only has knowledge of one of these: the cell. Having knowledge of all three makes formatting light years easier.

Still not quite excel

Don’t get me wrong: Numbers is no replacement for the raw power of Excel. Writing complicated formulas is not nearly as easy, and scripting doesn’t seem very possible (or perhaps plausible). If you need to do some hardcore analysis, you’re probably better off firing up trusty old Excel (if not for anything but familiarity). But if you’re looking for a simple spreadsheet program to create some easy to use number-crunching: Numbers is your program.

Yet, in a wonderful twist of irony Numbers can open more Excel files than Excel can. It’s been over a year since Office 2007 XML-based files (.xlsx, .docx, etc) started showing up. It is still impossible to open these files on a Mac. How ridiculous is that ? (come on Microsoft) Luckily Numbers comes to the rescue and supports importing these new files.