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Apple Updates Pages, Numbers, and Keynote With New Features for iOS 15 and macOS Monterey
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Are you sure? What do you mean by "noncontiguous selection?
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Well, I want Numbers to get better and better. It is so nice to use, so elegant. Thinking about Google sheets or Excel makes me not want to work. Numbers does encourage me to work thanks to its beauty and easy way to guide you on formula's syntax. What I really miss on Numbers are Buttons. Now that you can make a formulary out of a table (How great it is if you are an iOS user!), cells should be able to be buttons so that, for instance, by clicking on a cell in the formulary (tapping on the iOS formulary) the NOW day/time value would automatically appear. Or also, tapping a cell would automatically send you to the next cell in the following row.
Please, if you are reading this, could you please tell me if you have ever missed having this kind of Buttons to activate simple macros within Numbers?
Thanks for sharing.
LOL! Indeed. Although I must admit I was very surprised to see these before-last icons. They seemed like coming from an 1990 Microsoft design.
Same for macOS... my old iMac can't updated past Catalina and alas this update seems to break live collaboration capabilities with Big Sur and Monterey users.
I totally agree, but that is only one way of presenting information, and not necessarily the best way. If I am parsing data that that might use conditional highlighting as you suggest, I find a much better way is to have a series of columns with tests built as logic and color code those columns if necessary. The fact that each test has its own column, is far clearer, and better presented than conditional formatting.
As far as macros and buttons, no I gave up on macros years ago when I realized that they were unwieldy and couldn't be well maintained by others. The time to set them up and maintain them exceeded the time it took to just do the work, so a nogo, and don't get me started on software updates and version control. and you are talking to a guy who used to believe the MS BS about embedded applications. I actually wrote them in Lotus123 with the application development toolkit (an elegant precursor to VBA), and then migrated to Excel when the company forced a switch and Jim Manzi ran Lotus into the ground.
A much better approach is to just use the right tool for the job. No more half-assed excel data bases, use SQL - there are many free editions for databases
An example of doing it correctly is my 50 year financial planning tool (originally written in Excel, but way better in Numbers due to multiple table per sheet implementation and referencing). This handles multiple retirement plans each with their own escalation rates, tax preferences and regular savings accounts, social security, inflation, and federal and state income taxes. Targetting is done based on multiple parameters on a graphically presented dashboard to achieve a desired after tax annual "income", and resulting end of life asset valuations. Far better than my financial planner has available.
Buttons? I used to use them to compute the annual income on Excel, the macro would execute repetitively until it found the solution. Now I use a series of pop ups and steppers and watch the results on the graphs - which BTW, you can layer to combine multiple effects. Mush more elegant and intuitive and far easier to modify and maintain.
You do realize that they were patented or trademarked or something like that. Just freed up in 2020. Oh yah, our patent system is great! LOL. Let's take a basic idea, get a patent on it, not even use it in a product, and then sue people who use a similar idea.
isn't that intuitively obvious? If you have old devices that can't run newer software and you use newer features, well.....
From the update notes:
Create new spreadsheets from the app icon in the Dock
Yes please TC 😚
Edit: The app needs to be open before you can right-click > New [doc]. I'll take that kiss back...
Create new spreadsheets from the app icon in the Dock
Yes please TC 😚
Edit: The app needs to be open before you can right-click > New [doc]. I'll take that kiss back...
The new icons are much better. Will probably keep using my own for now.
Feel free to use. MR won't accept icns file as an upload, but you can convert from these png's.I'd be happy to help beta test your iconsThose are great!
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yup, Apple keeps pulling this sh*t, releasing an update for Keynote which immediately forces you to install or you can't collaborate. Forced update to Catalina with v10, and now I have fusion drive iMacs that crash constantly under Big Sur are f'd as far as Keynote goes. really sucks
The difference is it breaks the collaboration so you can no longer use a feature you were already using. You have no choice but to upgrade. You cannot keep using the version you have and still collaborate.
Excellent. So I can now not understand pivot tables in Excel AND Numbers.
Was hoping to be able to use the camera on my iPhone as a live video feed in Keynote but it seems to be screen only. Of course you can open the camera app but it's not very elegant. Maybe this and a wireless option could be next? Still a great update.
THIS frustrates me so much about the iWork apps — God forbid if you use a slightly older OS or older devices, anytime you (accidentally) touch a document with a newer version of the app, say goodbye to ever opening it again on your older version. There is no real reason why the newest iWork apps would not be able to run on an OS like High Sierra or iOS 10.
To each their own. The new icons look worse to me. Heck, all the icons look worse on Big Sur. They're trying to merge a more minimalistic Snow Leopard icon set. They look far less professional now.
No one uses a pen to scribe documents anymore. A simple lorem ipsum paragraph of generic text with an inset large letter A and a off-white backdrop would have sufficed for Pages.
Numbers should have a real plot with variables on their to show a plot. Not just a boring bar graph. And keynote is nearly identical to the prior one.
In the end, the added functionality is what I care about, and they finally fixed versioning for ePub to the Apple Bookstore now you can update the versioning inside of Pages. Duh 101. Then a Two Page spread is way overdue.
iWork is some of the best software on the market. I have an unhealthy love for it.
You realize the name "PivotTable" was trademarked, meaning no one else could use that name? The functionality was not patented. It's been around for decades, and Apple could have implemented this before the software giant LibreOffice did in 2013 (/sarcasm).
I could rattle off 100 features Excel has that Apple could add, but at the end of the day Numbers is a completely bare bones application.