excel to numbers?

[redgaz26]

hi all, my mum just bought an imac today. Shes uses excel on her pc, can i just email the documents to her yahoo email address and when she sets the mac up will those docs easily open in numbers(she bought iwork)

[clevin]

my guess is it depends on how complicated the excel files are. since there is no any choice, you can just try out, see what happens.

[Father Jack]

I've found "relatively simple" Excel spreadsheets can be opened without any problems in Numbers .. :)

[HLdan]

Yeah, most simple Excel spread sheets will open in Quicklook without any means of an application installed. So for example if your mom's iMac didn't have Numbers installed Quicklook could still read spread sheets sent to her.
BTW, that was quite cute, (your mum). :)

[redgaz26]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3B48a Safari/419.3)

LOL it is my mum. Ive had my mac for a while now. Finally convinced my mum to do the same. She even bought apple tv.
So the excel docs should be ok. Cheers.

[walnuts]

An important thing to note though is that numbers files don't translate well back to excel. Tabs don't translate to tabs. Each little table in a numbers tab turns into a tab in excel.

I actually tried this at the apple store when I was considering iwork. I took a spreadsheet from work, opened it in numbers, and resaved it as .xls. While the data was still there, its not a seamless transition. You can't count on it to be interchangable with office without having to reformat/tinker with it to get it back to its original state in excel. It was a dealbreaker for me.

[redgaz26]

thanks for the info, its basic stuff so it should be fine. Once it's on the mac the docs will not come back to a PC so hopefully their will be no probs.
for my sake I hope so lol.

[redgaz26]

installed iwork and not one file would open, they were .xlr and .wps
so downloaded neo office and they all opened no bother:D:D:D:D:D

now I take it she cannot take iwork back for a refund as she has opened it up??

if not then thats £55 for nowt....................

[GregE]

installed iwork and not one file would open, they were .xlr and .wps
so downloaded neo office and they all opened no bother:D:D:D:D:D

now I take it she cannot take iwork back for a refund as she has opened it up??

if not then thats £55 for nowt....................

Those are not Excel and Word files. They are Microsoft Works files. I guess your mum thought she was using Excel. Too bad you didn't mention the file extensions before installing iWorks. I'm sure somebody would have tried opening the files for you or maybe you could have installed the trial version.

That being said, I saw where somebody said to change the extension to xls and that Excel might open it. Sure couldn't hurt to try it and see if Numbers can open it. You could also open them first on a PC with Excel and Word and then save them to .xls and .doc files if you have a PC with Excel and Word on it.

I also found this product but it's not free.

http://www.dataviz.com/products/maclinkplus/index.html

I doubt if you can return it since you opened it. You could always sell it on e-bay or here and get some of your money back.

[redgaz26]

thanks for that:confused::confused::confused: I feel quite dumb now I should have checked the files out.
I'll keep iwork for myself, get some use out of it.
I have to say that neo looks really impressive for a free app.
again cheers!!!!!!!!!!!

[hotoru]

Those are not .......
That being said, I saw where somebody said to change the extension to xls and that Excel might open it. Sure couldn't hurt to try it and see if Numbers can open it. You could also open them first on a PC with Excel and Word and then save them to .xls and .doc files if you have a PC with Excel and Word on it.
......

Thanks for the tip. I changed the .xlr to .xls in finder and it uploaded to google docs very well. I would say this might not work for more complicated files but I am not sure MS Works will produce more complicated files :-)