iPadOS Numbers vs. macOS Numbers

[arc of the universe]

I'm interested in hearing about user's experiences using the apple app Numbers on the iPad.

Especially, if you have used Numbers also on a mac, and how you think they compare in terms of usability.
Is there anything in Numbers that is much more complicated to do on the iPad than on the mac?

 

[01cowherd]

It's not bad, but I would pick a Mac over iPad for Numbers any day. It actually has most (if not all) of the functionality, but you have to go through the iOS UI. My biggest complaints are:

• Everything has a slow (relative to Mac) animation, since it is a touch-first UI. For example, I can easily get it to drop key presses when I invoke the Find window by pressing ⌘F and immediately typing, because it doesn't record key presses until the animation finishes.
• The statistics previews when you select cells are unavailable. You have to autofill into a cell to get statistics.
• Autocomplete has a tiny window, the same size as on iPhone, so most of the suggestions are cut off. Even when your iPad is in landscape or using an external display. It's ridiculous.
• If you use the Stepper cell format, you cannot type into it even with a hardware keyboard. You can only use the up/down arrows to cycle through numbers.
• Not all keyboard shortcuts are implemented. For example, Collapse/Expand Group (⌘8/⌘9) is there, but the related ones like ⇧⌘8, ⌥⌘8, ⇧⌥⌘8, etc for expand are not.
• Selecting cells can be a bit wonky compared to what you might expect from Mac.

 

[sdz]

It's not bad, but I would pick a Mac over iPad for Numbers any day. It actually has most (if not all) of the functionality, but you have to go through the iOS UI. My biggest complaints are:

• Everything has a slow (relative to Mac) animation, since it is a touch-first UI. For example, I can easily get it to drop key presses when I invoke the Find window by pressing ⌘F and immediately typing, because it doesn't record key presses until the animation finishes.
• The statistics previews when you select cells are unavailable. You have to autofill into a cell to get statistics.
• Autocomplete has a tiny window, the same size as on iPhone, so most of the suggestions are cut off. Even when your iPad is in landscape or using an external display. It's ridiculous.
• If you use the Stepper cell format, you cannot type into it even with a hardware keyboard. You can only use the up/down arrows to cycle through numbers.
• Not all keyboard shortcuts are implemented. For example, Collapse/Expand Group (⌘8/⌘9) is there, but the related ones like ⇧⌘8, ⌥⌘8, ⇧⌥⌘8, etc for expand are not.
• Selecting cells can be a bit wonky compared to what you might expect from Mac.

• you cannot define list fields

 

[doogm]

Maybe one thing that the iPadOS version has that I really like (and I think iOS, though I rarely use Numbers on my phone) is data entry of cells that are formatted as date/time. There is a very specific date and time entry pad with very helpful buttons "today", "now", etc.

That said: I use Numbers whenever I can on the Mac, but I can get by on the iPad, and that one data entry keyboard is a nice touch on the iPad, particularly compared with Excel/MS CoPilot / whatever it's called these days.

 

[01cowherd]

• you cannot define list fields

If you have an external keyboard, you can by pressing ⌥⏎.

Maybe one thing that the iPadOS version has that I really like (and I think iOS, though I rarely use Numbers on my phone) is data entry of cells that are formatted as date/time. There is a very specific date and time entry pad with very helpful buttons "today", "now", etc.

Yeah it’s very convenient for quickly adjusting dates. On Mac, there is a menu item and keyboard shortcut for inserting current date or time, though. (⌃⇧⌘D / ⌃⇧⌘T)
One more thing iPad/iPhone has is “Forms” which is a streamlined UI for adding new rows to a table. Although I don’t really use it, it’s probably very nice use cases like manual data entry, surveys, etc.

 

[StoneJack]

ipad OS itself is a bottleneck for serious work. Maybe reading and annotating pdfs is ok but for anything beyond that it is a nightmare.

 

[sdz]

ipad OS itself is a bottleneck for serious work. Maybe reading and annotating pdfs is ok but for anything beyond that it is a nightmare.

what exactly is the problem?

 

[xxFoxtail]

I use Numbers on the iPad daily. I've started switching some of my spreadsheets over to Excel, but I think I still prefer Numbers over it. Just seems easier to use and less glitchy. Compared to the Mac version, it's kind of hard to tell much difference. The UI is different, but there's nothing I can do on the Mac version that I can’t on the iPad version.