Excel vs. Numbers

[maflynn]

I picked a month subscription of office 365 (I know I shouldn't have) to test out Excel. I've only been playing with excel (on the iPad) for a couple of hours, so I know I haven't really delved deep into the details.

I have a number of spreadsheets that I use for my personal life, there's also a lot of spreadsheets I use for work. I had the personal stuff in numbers, so I can sync them on my Mac and iPad.

I will say that I liked numbers up until they "upgraded" it and removed much of the features the only thing that kept me using it, was the fact that it so easily synced with my Mac and iPad.

In comparing the two, I found the general UI of Excel to be superior, the ease to which I could enter formulas was night and day compared to Numbers. The depth of formatting and available formulas is also in Excel's favor.

Overall, I think MS did a great job in rolling this out. Where it falls down is the subscription model. Do I really want to pay 100 a year? In all honesty I really don't but if apple fails to improve numbers I may not have too much of a choice.

This also allows me to use a single product for both my work stuff and my personal stuff.

 

[Ezhik]

If you are considering buying the subscription, keep in mind that you also get to install Office on 5 computers, and you also get 60 minutes of worldwide calls on Skype per month, and 20GB of storage on OneDrive.

 

[ScottNWDW]

If you are considering buying the subscription, keep in mind that you also get to install Office on 5 computers, and you also get 60 minutes of worldwide calls on Skype per month, and 20GB of storage on OneDrive.

In addition to that you also get the latest versions of all the software, Mac, PC, iOS etc all included with the subscriptions.

Remember it's not $99 just to use the software with the iPad, it's to use it on your various platforms. The syncing has been great, the feature parity so far (at least for me) has been spot on. I am enjoying being able to open home and work documents on whatever device I am using and being able to work with them as such.

 

[drambuie]

For those who use Office 365 on PCs and Macs, $99 a year is a great bargain. The PC version of 365 is actually Office 2013 Professional, which would otherwise cost $500 for a single license. The OS X version is Home and Business 2011, a $200 application. When new versions of Office are released, Office 365 users get the upgrades for free, so, if the MS upgrade cycles for both platforms of Office are 3 to 4 years, the savings are substantial for those who always upgrade to the latest versions.

 

[0007776]

I haven't tried it on the iPad, but excel is definitely a better product than numbers for most uses. Personally though if Numbers meets your needs I wouldn't want to spend money on a subscription, but I also refuse to buy any software as a subscription up until I no longer have any other options.

 

[maflynn]

If Numbers meets your needs I wouldn't want to spend money on a subscription

That's where I'm at now. I'm really like excel for the iPad. I've been a heavy duty excel user for many years - I wrote an entire accounting system (via VBA) in excel once and so I have a familiarity.

There are things that I don't like about numbers but I can get around them. At this point. I do like the iCloud integration, and I use the the apps via the web.

By the same token, Office with its OneDrive integration brings it on par with iCloud but I think the iCloud solution seems a tad more polished. I'm not sure why tbh, I cannot put my finger on it.

Maybe its me, maybe its my experience with Excel, but I don't think Numbers is not very intuitive which is very un-apple like. Lack of features is also un-apple like. Finally there is Apple's update cycle, they let iWork whither on the vine for many years, only to roll out an upgrade that removed many features (but adding iCloud integration)

While they have added features with the latest update, its still a ghost of its former self and its former self failed to measure up very much to excel.

I'll be playing with excel and comparing it with numbers a but longer since I have a whole month.

Since my wife and kids can now load office on their computers, this makes it a better deal more and more but then I may not think so come next year when I have to pony up another 99 bucks.