Numbers - first thoughts

ok. i've been trying out trail of numbers. i'm big excel user @ work had high hopes apple come new , different.

first impression how ordinary is, mean - spreadsheet you'd expect spreadsheet do. sure has apple flash, , page layout stuff looks nice, other seems surprisingly complete spreadsheet program.

layout familiar if you're used keynote or pages, sparse toolbar , "inspector" there 2nd toolbar various options. font size on thing tiny, pretty hard read if don't have great eyesight. luckily do, wife doesn't , complained it. layout of main toolbar customisable, 2nd toolbar doesn't seem changeable or removable, unless i'm missing something.

there issues. firstly, thing slow molasses. ok i'll admit right i'm trying out on 1ghz g4 powerbook. use excel 2004 on machine , in comparision excel, numbers crawls. opening excel spreadsheet took minutes. ok, fair enough, conversion difficult thing. opened csv file, text file, , conversion took 90 seconds. corresponding file opens in excel in 10 seconds on same machine. don't understand why new app should sluggish. remember people complaining same thing pages however. apple write these apps in applescript or i'm going install trial on macbook pro tomorrow see if useable on modern mac, right couldn't recommend has lower end g4 based mac, whereas microsoft excel works great on machines. ok older program, same thing , see no reason why importing csv or scrolling through numbers should juddery, pretty basic stuff. guess flashy interface causes high overhead on program.

on positive side, excel importing did work surprisingly well, figures looked same did on excel, slight smoother, otherwise ok. dialog box full of "warnings" popped after long wait import. couldn't bothered go through these, seem incompatibilities. file imported excel 2004, haven't tried open xml files yet (office 2007 windows).

couple of weird things: on chart seems can adjust min/max , tick interval on 1 axis only. odd, i'm sure i'm doing wrong here. options charts seem minimal @ best. thing can't "+" symbol points if you're plotting x/y line plot, scatter plot! when sorting didn't give me option of having top row name of row. excel has checkbox.

cool thing: when select regions, statistics region selected appear in bottom left (mean, max etc).

care share thoughts far. right consider myself both impressed (at completeness) , frustrated (at sluggishness).

 

update. had force quit damn program because relatively simple select action ("show rows column k not equal this") lead 10 mins cpu 100%. sigh.

 

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