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Numbers (software)
Encyclopedia
Numbers is a spreadsheet
application developed by Apple Inc. as part of the iWork
productivity suite alongside Keynote and Pages
. Numbers 1.0 was announced on August 7, 2007 and thus it is the newest application in the iWork Suite. Numbers runs on Mac OS X v10.4 "Tiger"
or newer. On January 27, 2010, Apple announced a new version of Numbers for iPad
with an all new touch interface.
Unlike traditional spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel
, Numbers uses a free-form "canvas" approach that demotes tables to one of many different media types. Numbers includes features from the seminal Lotus Improv
, notably the use of formulas based on ranges rather than cells, but implements these within the traditional spreadsheet concepts as opposed to Improv's use of multidimensional databases. Numbers also includes numerous stylistic improvements in an effort to improve the visual appearance of spreadsheets. At its introductory demonstration, Steve Jobs
pitched a more usable interface and better control over the appearance and presentation of tables of data.
or Lotus 1-2-3
. In the traditional model, the spreadsheet is the first-class citizen of the system, acting as both the primary interface for work, as well as the container for other types of media like charts. In contrast, Numbers uses a separate "canvas" as its basic container object, and sheets are simply one of many objects that can be placed within the canvas.For reasons that are not mentioned in the documentation, canvases are referred to as "sheets" within the program.
This difference is not simply a case of semantics. In order to provide a large workspace, conventional spreadsheets extend in X and Y to form a very large table - ideally infinite, but normally limited to some smaller dimension. Some of these cells, selected by the user, hold data. Data is manipulated using formulas, which are placed in other cells in the same sheet and output their results into the cell's display. The rest of the sheet is "sparse", currently unused. Sheets often grow very complex with input data, intermediate values from formulas and output areas, separated by blank areas. In order to manage this complexity, Excel allows one to hide rows that are not of interest, often intermediate values.
In contrast, Numbers does not have an underlying spreadsheet in the traditional sense, but uses individual tables for the same basic purpose. Tables are an X and Y collection of cells, like a sheet, but extend only to the limits of the data they hold. Each section of data, or output from formulas, can be combined into an existing table, or placed into a new table. Tables can be collected by the user onto single or multiple canvases. Whereas a typical Excel sheet has data strewn across it, a Numbers canvas could build the same output through smaller individual tables encompassing the same data.
In traditional spreadsheets, the semantic value of the numbers is lost. The number in cell B2 is not "the number of cars sold in the month of January", but simply "the value in cell B2". The formula for calculating the average is based on the manipulation of the cells, in the form
During the development of Improv
, the Lotus team discovered that these sorts of formulas were both difficult to use, and resistant to future changes in the spreadsheet layout. Their solution was to make the user explicitly define the semantic content of the sheets - that the B column contained "cars sold". These data ranges were known as "categories". Formulas were written by referring to these categories by name, creating a new category that could be (if desired) placed in the sheet for display. Using the car example, the formula in Improv would be
Numbers uses a hybrid approach to the creation of formulas, supporting the use of named data like Improv, but implementing them in-sheet like Excel. In basic operation, Numbers can be used just like Excel; data can be typed anywhere and formulas can be created by referring to the data by its cell. However, if the user types a header into the table, something one normally does as a matter of course, Numbers uses this to automatically construct a named range for the cells on that row or column. For instance, if the user types "month" into A1, and then types the names "January", "February"... into the cells below it, Numbers constructs a named range for the cells A2 through A13 and gives it the name "month". The same is true when the user types in the figures for sales and income. The user can write the averaging formula in a category-like text format,
Similar to Improv, formulas can be represented as icons in Numbers, allowing them to be dragged about the sheets. One noteworthy example of this is a sidebar which contains the sum, average and other basic calculations for the current selection in the active table. These serve a function similar to the sum that appears at the bottom of the window in Excel. However, the user can drag one of the function icons from the sidebar into the sheet to make the calculation appear in that location. In another nod to Improv, the Formula List shows all of the formulas in the spreadsheet in a separate area, and allows edits in place or easy navigation to their use in the sheets.
Numbers '09 contains 262 built-in functions that can be used in formulas. This contrasts with Excel 2007's 338 functions. Many of the functions in Numbers are identical to those in Excel; missing ones tend to be related to statistics, although this area was greatly improved in Numbers '09.
Numbers '09 includes a system for categorizing data similar to pivot table
s. Pivots were introduced in Improv and were manipulated by dragging the category headers, allowing the user to quickly rotate rows into columns or vice versa. Although Numbers has similar draggable headers, this style of direct manipulation is missing. Instead, Numbers places pop-up menus in the column headers allowing the user to collapse multiple rows into totals (sums, averages, etc.) based on data that is common across rows. This is the same basic functionality as a pivot table, but lacks the ease of re-arrangement of the Improv model.
Like other products in the iWork
suite, Numbers includes a variety of styles and layouts designed by professional illustrators. Opening an Excel sheet in Numbers results in a display with smooth fonts, and clean layout and color selections. These can then be modified, optionally using one of the supplied templates, and saved out to Excel format again with these styles intact. Numbers also allows sheets to be email
ed in Excel format in a single step, or shared on Apple's iWork.com
website.
has given it high marks, especially newer versions, awarding Numbers '09 four mice out of five. They did point out a number of common issues, especially problems exporting to Excel and the inability to "lock" cells to prevent them moving when the table is scrolled. Numbers for the iPhone and iPad have received similar favourable reviews.
Spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a computer application that simulates a paper accounting worksheet. It displays multiple cells usually in a two-dimensional matrix or grid consisting of rows and columns. Each cell contains alphanumeric text, numeric values or formulas...
application developed by Apple Inc. as part of the iWork
IWork
iWork is an office suite of desktop applications created by Apple for the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. The first version of iWork, iWork '05, was released in 2005. The suite originally bundled Keynote, a presentation program which had previously been sold as a standalone application, and...
productivity suite alongside Keynote and Pages
Pages
Pages is a word processor and page layout application developed by Apple. It is part of the iWork productivity suite and runs on the Mac OS X & iOS operating systems. The first version of Pages was announced on January 11, 2005, and was released one month later. The most recent Macintosh version,...
. Numbers 1.0 was announced on August 7, 2007 and thus it is the newest application in the iWork Suite. Numbers runs on Mac OS X v10.4 "Tiger"
Mac OS X v10.4
Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger is the fifth major release of Mac OS X, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Tiger was released to the public on 29 April 2005 for US$129.95 as the successor to Mac OS X Panther , which had been released 18 months earlier...
or newer. On January 27, 2010, Apple announced a new version of Numbers for iPad
IPad
The iPad is a line of tablet computers designed, developed and marketed by Apple Inc., primarily as a platform for audio-visual media including books, periodicals, movies, music, games, and web content. The iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010 by Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs. Its size and...
with an all new touch interface.
Unlike traditional spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel is a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications...
, Numbers uses a free-form "canvas" approach that demotes tables to one of many different media types. Numbers includes features from the seminal Lotus Improv
Lotus Improv
Lotus Improv was a spreadsheet program from Lotus Development that attempted to re-define the way a spreadsheet should work. Instead of treating the grid as the system for referencing data, Improv made all data exist in named ranges. Operations on the data then referred to these names, rather than...
, notably the use of formulas based on ranges rather than cells, but implements these within the traditional spreadsheet concepts as opposed to Improv's use of multidimensional databases. Numbers also includes numerous stylistic improvements in an effort to improve the visual appearance of spreadsheets. At its introductory demonstration, Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs
Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc...
pitched a more usable interface and better control over the appearance and presentation of tables of data.
Basic model
Numbers works in a fashion somewhat different from traditional spreadsheets like Microsoft ExcelMicrosoft Excel
Microsoft Excel is a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications...
or Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus 1-2-3 is a spreadsheet program from Lotus Software . It was the IBM PC's first "killer application"; its huge popularity in the mid-1980s contributed significantly to the success of the IBM PC in the corporate environment.-Beginnings:...
. In the traditional model, the spreadsheet is the first-class citizen of the system, acting as both the primary interface for work, as well as the container for other types of media like charts. In contrast, Numbers uses a separate "canvas" as its basic container object, and sheets are simply one of many objects that can be placed within the canvas.For reasons that are not mentioned in the documentation, canvases are referred to as "sheets" within the program.
This difference is not simply a case of semantics. In order to provide a large workspace, conventional spreadsheets extend in X and Y to form a very large table - ideally infinite, but normally limited to some smaller dimension. Some of these cells, selected by the user, hold data. Data is manipulated using formulas, which are placed in other cells in the same sheet and output their results into the cell's display. The rest of the sheet is "sparse", currently unused. Sheets often grow very complex with input data, intermediate values from formulas and output areas, separated by blank areas. In order to manage this complexity, Excel allows one to hide rows that are not of interest, often intermediate values.
In contrast, Numbers does not have an underlying spreadsheet in the traditional sense, but uses individual tables for the same basic purpose. Tables are an X and Y collection of cells, like a sheet, but extend only to the limits of the data they hold. Each section of data, or output from formulas, can be combined into an existing table, or placed into a new table. Tables can be collected by the user onto single or multiple canvases. Whereas a typical Excel sheet has data strewn across it, a Numbers canvas could build the same output through smaller individual tables encompassing the same data.
Formulas and functions
Consider a simple spreadsheet being used to calculate the average value of all car sales in a month for a given year. The sheet might contain the month number or name in column A, the number of cars sold in column B, and the total income in column C. The user wishes to complete the task of "calculate the average income per car sold by dividing the total income by the number of cars sold, and put the resulting average in column D". From the user's perspective, the values in the cells have semantic content, they are "cars sold" and "total income", and they want to manipulate this to produce an output value, "average price".In traditional spreadsheets, the semantic value of the numbers is lost. The number in cell B2 is not "the number of cars sold in the month of January", but simply "the value in cell B2". The formula for calculating the average is based on the manipulation of the cells, in the form
=C2/B2. As the spreadsheet is unaware of the user's desire for D to be an output column, the user copies that formula into all of the cells in D. However, as the formula refers to data on different rows, it must be modified as it is copied into the cells in D, changing it to refer to the correct row. Excel automates this later task by using a relative referencing system that works as long as the cells retain their location relative to the formula. However, this system requires Excel to track any changes to the layout of the sheet and adjust the formulas, a process that is far from foolproof.During the development of Improv
Lotus Improv
Lotus Improv was a spreadsheet program from Lotus Development that attempted to re-define the way a spreadsheet should work. Instead of treating the grid as the system for referencing data, Improv made all data exist in named ranges. Operations on the data then referred to these names, rather than...
, the Lotus team discovered that these sorts of formulas were both difficult to use, and resistant to future changes in the spreadsheet layout. Their solution was to make the user explicitly define the semantic content of the sheets - that the B column contained "cars sold". These data ranges were known as "categories". Formulas were written by referring to these categories by name, creating a new category that could be (if desired) placed in the sheet for display. Using the car example, the formula in Improv would be
average per car = total income / cars sold. Changes to the layout of the sheet would not effect the formulas; the data remains defined no matter where it is moved. It also meant that formulas calculating intermediate values did not have to be placed in the sheet and normally did not take up room. The downside to Improv's approach is that it demanded more information up-front, and was thus less suitable for "quick and dirty" calculations or basic list building.Numbers uses a hybrid approach to the creation of formulas, supporting the use of named data like Improv, but implementing them in-sheet like Excel. In basic operation, Numbers can be used just like Excel; data can be typed anywhere and formulas can be created by referring to the data by its cell. However, if the user types a header into the table, something one normally does as a matter of course, Numbers uses this to automatically construct a named range for the cells on that row or column. For instance, if the user types "month" into A1, and then types the names "January", "February"... into the cells below it, Numbers constructs a named range for the cells A2 through A13 and gives it the name "month". The same is true when the user types in the figures for sales and income. The user can write the averaging formula in a category-like text format,
= total income / cars sold. The formula will find the appropriate data and calculate the results independent of the row. Like Improv, this formula does not refer to the physical location of the data in the sheet, so the sheet can be dramatically modified without causing the formula to fail.Similar to Improv, formulas can be represented as icons in Numbers, allowing them to be dragged about the sheets. One noteworthy example of this is a sidebar which contains the sum, average and other basic calculations for the current selection in the active table. These serve a function similar to the sum that appears at the bottom of the window in Excel. However, the user can drag one of the function icons from the sidebar into the sheet to make the calculation appear in that location. In another nod to Improv, the Formula List shows all of the formulas in the spreadsheet in a separate area, and allows edits in place or easy navigation to their use in the sheets.
Numbers '09 contains 262 built-in functions that can be used in formulas. This contrasts with Excel 2007's 338 functions. Many of the functions in Numbers are identical to those in Excel; missing ones tend to be related to statistics, although this area was greatly improved in Numbers '09.
Numbers '09 includes a system for categorizing data similar to pivot table
Pivot table
In data processing, a pivot table is a data summarization tool found in data visualization programs such as spreadsheets or business intelligence software. Among other functions, pivot-table tools can automatically sort, count, total or give the average of the data stored in one table or spreadsheet...
s. Pivots were introduced in Improv and were manipulated by dragging the category headers, allowing the user to quickly rotate rows into columns or vice versa. Although Numbers has similar draggable headers, this style of direct manipulation is missing. Instead, Numbers places pop-up menus in the column headers allowing the user to collapse multiple rows into totals (sums, averages, etc.) based on data that is common across rows. This is the same basic functionality as a pivot table, but lacks the ease of re-arrangement of the Improv model.
Layout and display
As Numbers uses the canvas as the basis for the document, media is not tied to the tables at all. One could build a Numbers canvas with a collection of photographs and no tables at all. In typical use, one or more tables are placed about the canvas and sized and styled to show only the data of interest. Charts and labels are commonly positioned around the tables. Other media, like photographs or illustrations, can be added as well. Numbers' display-centric model has been referred to as a "page layout and presentation app disguised as a spreadsheet app".Like other products in the iWork
IWork
iWork is an office suite of desktop applications created by Apple for the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. The first version of iWork, iWork '05, was released in 2005. The suite originally bundled Keynote, a presentation program which had previously been sold as a standalone application, and...
suite, Numbers includes a variety of styles and layouts designed by professional illustrators. Opening an Excel sheet in Numbers results in a display with smooth fonts, and clean layout and color selections. These can then be modified, optionally using one of the supplied templates, and saved out to Excel format again with these styles intact. Numbers also allows sheets to be email
Email
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
ed in Excel format in a single step, or shared on Apple's iWork.com
IWork.com
iWork.com is an online service by Apple complementing the iWork suite of office productivity software. It was released as a public beta on January 6, 2009 at the Macworld Conference & Expo. The iWork.com service provides a web interface for viewing, downloading, and commenting uploaded documents...
website.
Reception
Numbers has been well received in the press, notably for its text-based formulas, clean looks and ease-of-use. MacWorldMacworld
Macworld is a web site and monthly computer magazine dedicated to Apple Macintosh products. It is published by Mac Publishing, which is headquartered in San Francisco, California...
has given it high marks, especially newer versions, awarding Numbers '09 four mice out of five. They did point out a number of common issues, especially problems exporting to Excel and the inability to "lock" cells to prevent them moving when the table is scrolled. Numbers for the iPhone and iPad have received similar favourable reviews.
Other notable features
- Highly table-centric workflow, where lists are easy to structure with headers and summaries.
- Checkbox, slider, and pulldown list cells.
- Drag and drop of functions from a sidebar into cells.
- A Print Preview that allows all editing functions while previewing, as well as realtime scaling and moving of tables to arrange them freely on the page(s).
- An XMLXMLExtensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
native file format, using document bundlesBundle (NEXTSTEP)In NEXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, their lineal descendants Mac OS X, iOS, and in GNUstep, a bundle is a directory that allows related resources such as an application's executable and its graphics to be grouped together, appearing as a single file to the user....
to contain media and associated files. - Exports to Microsoft Excel, but lacks certain Excel features, including Visual Basic for ApplicationsVisual Basic for ApplicationsVisual Basic for Applications is an implementation of Microsoft's event-driven programming language Visual Basic 6 and its associated integrated development environment , which are built into most Microsoft Office applications...
(absent from the 2008 version of Office for Mac) and pivot tables.