Numbers on the Mac

PaulH · Post by **PaulH** » October 13th, 2007, 9:52 am

Has anyone used the new Numbers spreadsheet app on the Mac to record their times? It doesn't seem to be as flexible with date/time formats as Excel, so when I opened my existing spreadsheet it coughed up a bunch of errors. Before I try to diagnose I'd love to hear any hard-earned wisdom

Cheers, Paul

Citroen · Post by **Citroen** » October 14th, 2007, 3:52 am

The date format is mm/dd/yyyy in the *.CSV data from the LogCard Utility (since it doesn't have any internationalisation (I18N) support). Perhaps we should petition Scott H @ C2 to get that changed.

If your locale has a differing date format that my account for the error.

I've used the logcard data with Open Office Calc on Windows - that works just fine. http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/index.html

PaulH · Post by **PaulH** » October 14th, 2007, 4:47 am

The big problem Numbers has (imho) is that it's rather rigid on date/time - if something is a date then it's a date, so finding your 500m pace for a 2k piece by dividing your time by 4 doesn't work (you want a quarter of October 14, 2007? What are you talking about?)

Citroen · Post by **Citroen** » October 14th, 2007, 5:19 pm

PaulH wrote:The big problem Numbers has (imho) is that it's rather rigid on date/time - if something is a date then it's a date, so finding your 500m pace for a 2k piece by dividing your time by 4 doesn't work (you want a quarter of October 14, 2007? What are you talking about?)

So it's a clone of the oxymoron of all software; "Microsoft Works". Which is a truly awful pile of trash. Perhaps I'm biased - I've used Excel since V2.0.

PaulH · Post by **PaulH** » October 15th, 2007, 3:14 am

Me too, in fact I may have used 1.0 briefly as well. Excel is better, but I thought I'd have a go with Numbers. I may have to switch back...

Citroen · Post by **Citroen** » October 15th, 2007, 8:01 am

PaulH wrote:Excel is better...

Excel is the best of the best, outstrips everything including 1-2-3. [But my theory (with office products) is that you'll always like the one you meet first the best.]

PaulH · Post by **PaulH** » October 15th, 2007, 8:40 am

It has one immense failing for me on the Mac. F2 is the key to edit the content of a cell, and this knowledge is buried deep within my hind brain. On the Mac it does something else (I still haven't worked out what), and while that other thing may be a fantastic feature, it's wrong because it's not what I expect

DavidA · Post by **DavidA** » October 15th, 2007, 4:52 pm

Although Excel is definitely more powerful, I have started using Numbers. I like Numbers layout flexibility a lot! I did have to do some playing around when I first imported my data/forumulae from Excel, but I have been glad that I did. There are some other feature that I particularly like in Numbers, for instance sliders. They make it extremely easy to see what I need to do to reach certain goals, and can easily 'try out' different goals.

David