Numbers: disappointment of the year :(

[dr_lha]

Since Numbers is useless, and Pages close to useless (due to incompatibility with bibliography software), $80 is expensive for just Keynote. And as far as error bars and resizable markers go - how hard can that be?

Just to clear this up: You can resize the markers on a plot.

Also for science: Astronomy is a growing field for Macs. The last conference I went to out of about 700 people, more than half had Mac laptops. In my lab we're moving to Macs wholesale, we even have an XServe now replacing a Dell Linux box. Almost every scientist who works at NASA gets a MacBook Pro now as their laptop.

 

[bousozoku]

...
Numbers description on Apple's site seems to fit the bill.

That is, until you actually try it.
...

So, you read into the description that it did everything that you wanted it to do without verifying each detail and now, you're upset that the marketing people let you read between the lines?

You're in a long line of people who were fooled into thinking the G4 was the best processor ever and that the G5 would reach 3.0 GHz and...

Keynote at version 1.0 was pretty and didn't do much well. Now, it's a lot better. Pages was good at the start but has improved. The fact that third parties don't support it is something that Apple can't change by itself. The third parties have to want to support it. Still, the current version works pretty well on its own.

There is nothing to say that Numbers won't grow and they're not stopping you from giving feedback. You think something is important, you should let Apple know since we cannot do anything about it.

Personally, I think that Numbers is a good 1.0 release that has a long way to go but the basics work. It's not a disappointment for being exactly what it was planned to be.

 

[Lesser Evets]

Write Apple and tell them. That's the best way to get it fixed in future.

For home use it does me extremely well so far.

 

[G4R2]

I wouldn't consider Numbers to be disappointing for the demographic it is intended for, a demographic that is easily discerned from the included templates. This application is clearly geared for casual home use and those who are inclined to use spreadsheets for planning a wedding or a birthday party.

To the list of Mac OS X applications that are suitable for professional data analysis I would add the often neglected Aabel (as well as its companion Citrin). My profession is in science as well and I've used these applications as a complement to the other programs listed by other users.

Here's some more info:

http://www.gigawiz.com/aabel.html

Of course, the disadvantage of a program like this is the missing wedding planner template, but I'm sure it's passable for that sort of task.

 

[dr_lha]

Write Apple and tell them. That's the best way to get it fixed in future.

For home use it does me extremely well so far.

Perhaps it should be bundled in "iHome" then and not "iWork"?

 

[TheStranger55]

Perhaps if you're a student, but its not just students who get the educational discount. I'm not a student and the version of Office I have has no restrictions on use.

Who really cares about those restrictions anyway, and when would it really matter? Do you really think Microsoft would come to sue you because you use Excel "the wrong way"? What a joke!

I don't get it. Why would buy software and then violate the TOA by using it outside of educational use?

I mean if your gonna violate the TOA, then you might as well just pirate the thing rather than paying for the student version and violating the TOA anyway.

 

[valiar]

I don't get it. Why would buy software and then violate the TOA by using it outside of educational use?

I mean if your gonna violate the TOA, then you might as well just pirate the thing rather than paying for the student version and violating the TOA anyway.

Actually, M$ allows you to buy educational Office even if, say, you have a kid going to middle school. That is why they have all these Student and Teacher boxes in CompUSA.

Of course, they have a good reason to allow this... Adding to proprietary format lock-in is always a good thing for them.

To the list of Mac OS X applications that are suitable for professional data analysis I would add the often neglected Aabel (as well as its companion Citrin). My profession is in science as well and I've used these applications as a complement to the other programs listed by other users.

Here's some more info:

http://www.gigawiz.com/aabel.html

Of course, the disadvantage of a program like this is the missing wedding planner template, but I'm sure it's passable for that sort of task.

The main disadvantage of Aabel is one: $345 for an academic license. I know it has some unique features (like map charts), but I won't use these. And for that kind of money I can buy 2.5 licenses to Kaleidagraph (which I did .
Yes, I can live without the wedding planner template.

 

[duskdawn]

I'm not a science student, and I had no idea what error bars were until I just googled them. I did take AP Chem in High School though, and in college I was a comp sci major before I switched to business. I got through all that without needing error bars, so it seems to me this is something only needed by math or hard science students? What is your actual major? I am actually curious to know who needs this, and I don't mean that sarcastically.

I am a doctor working on my PhD and I need it. Everyone who are doing scientific analysis or even serious business needs it too.

 

[shinji]

I am a doctor working on my PhD and I need it. Everyone who are doing scientific analysis or even serious business needs it too.

"serious business" yeah that's the technical term

 

[DaveP]

I guess it's telling that the Numbers main page at Apple shows spreadsheets with finance and marketing data / presentations.

 

[notsofatjames]

As far as target demographic goes...
Macs are used widely by the life science/biochem/chemistry community. Apple does realize the importance of scientists as its loyal customers.

I kinda have to disagree there. Scientists do use macs, as do photographers, and video editors to name a few. But more and more now, people are starting to use macs at home. Apple makes a large effort in advertising how simple macs are to use, how they're not effected with virus/spyware and other annoyances you get with windows. Although many professional environments use macs home use is on its way up, and more than professional.

I do agree plotting/graphing as a whole could be better in numbers, it's fiddly to use, and difficult to produce what you want when you compare it to excel, but as many others have said, its v1.0, and things can only get better!

 

[wordmunger]

I'm not a scientist, but a science writer, and I think Numbers is *almost* there. Error bars really should be added. That's freshman-level college stuff, and that's a big market for Apple.

There are lots of bugs -- the most glaring I've spotted so far is that percentages in the spreadsheet aren't rendered properly in graphs.

And it's slow!

Hopefully it will get better quickly!

 

[bousozoku]

I hope that people are sending feedback to Apple on their favourite but missing features.

If they don't know, they'll never add them.

 

[ppnkg]

I played a little with the trial version finally. Well, I agree with most of the criticisms above.

If apple want pages to be taken seriously, they must add support for bibliographies and endnotes. I'm staying with Mellel (which is also about to receive a major update)

re numbers/keynote, though, the graphs look amazing

 

[valiar]

I played a little with the trial version finally. Well, I agree with most of the criticisms above.

If apple want pages to be taken seriously, they must add support for bibliographies and endnotes. I'm staying with Mellel (which is also about to receive a major update)

re numbers/keynote, though, the graphs look amazing

Update to Mellel? That can be exciting news.
Do you have a link to any information about that somewhere?

 

[maknik]

Just want to chime in here, in case Apple ever looks over this thread.

I use real software for real data analysis, but I use Excel as a quick scratch-pad for simple calculations and plotting. This is what I hoped to use Numbers for as well.

My main complaint also dealt with the scatter plot, coincidentally. First, I can't even figure out how to connect the points with lines. Second, the formatting is terrible -- the spacing it chooses for the tick-marks/grid-lines results in lots of decimals rather than just dividing the line up at round numbers. Third, there seems to be a bug in setting the X and Y ranges, where values entered seem to get muddled up and apply to both ranges.

I'm sure Apple will fix most of this, but it seems to show haste, rather than a simple product that is designed to accrue features over time.

 

[aafuss1]

Althoughs Numbers is no match for FileMaker, I do use it as a simple databasse (by using formulas over multiple tables).

 

[aafuss1]

Macworld's review hilights the pros and cons of Numbers:
http://www.macworld.com/2007/08/reviews/numbers08/index.php.

I have not tried opening Excel 2003 files or MS Works: which saves in XLR (also a Excel file format), just yet .


It's not that slow on my Mac mini with 512MB RAM, and a 1.5GHz Core Solo CPU. But, I wouldn't recommend that anyone run it on a G4.

 

[netdog]

Numbers: disappointment of the year

You must have had a year quite free from any other sort of disappointment to make that the case.

 

[LilaP]

I'm not a science student, and I had no idea what error bars were until I just googled them. I did take AP Chem in High School though, and in college I was a comp sci major before I switched to business. I got through all that without needing error bars, so it seems to me this is something only needed by math or hard science students? I am actually curious to know who needs this

Hi Shinji,
If you know what an "average" is, then you should know what 'error bars' are...even though it isn't taught usually, which is too bad! It's not difficult! When you find the average height, e.g., of a group of people, you should also ask: what's the average difference from the average? That is, how much, on average, do the people in this group differ from their group's average height? That's the "error" (an unfortunate name, mainly stuck for historical reasons).

Apple includes a sixth-grade science template, showing a bar graph comparing growth of plants with and without road salt: one bar shows the average growth with salt, the other bar shows average growth without salt.

This is good information. But: what if the growth of plants with salt was wildly variable - some plants did fine on road salt, while others grew very very slowly - and the non-road-salt plants all grew at about the same rate (were not highly variable)? This could be worth knowing!

The error bar shows this information. The salt plants will have a long "error bar" (a vertical line) attached to the graph showing their average height, meaning high variability, and the non-salt plants will have a short error bar. So you get both average and average-difference-from-average information in the same picture.

Or imagine, measuring heights of fourth grade boys and girls: maybe the boys are shorter than girls on average, but the variability is much higher, so some boys are much taller but some much shorter. (I have no idea if this is true, just made it up). This would be worth knowing, for business as well as science (if you're selling pants to fourth-graders, e.g.....)

So you can see how, any time you want to know an average measurement, you should also know what the so-called "error" is (which just means the average difference from the average, basically - technically there are various formulas - "standard deviation", "standard error" - but this is the idea).

The "standard deviation" - which is what I am talking about above - is actually given for the plant data by Apple, in the numbers sheet in the plant presestation template!

So hopefully Apple will put it in their basic spreadsheets as soon as possible, as a matter of improving public education

Hope this helped.

 

[observer]

error bars?

All this whinging about error bars ignores the fact that error bars have different conventions in different fields. For some people, error bars are standard deviations; for others, they are 2 standard deviations, or t-confidence intervals. Or sometimes standard errors. And, an error bar should never be used on a bar chart -- bar charts should be used for count or frequency data, not measurements. If Excel makes it easy to put error whiskers on bar charts, then Microsoft is just promoting numerical illiteracy. Variability with a group of measurements is much better indicated by box plots.

There are graphs for which error bars are appropriate, but the ones I can think of are complex summaries of highly structured data, and not easy to produce. They shouldn't be something you can push a button and add on.

Maybe Apple didn't put error bar capability into Numbers because they didn't want to follow Excel's lead in making it easy to produce garbage. More likely, they tried to follow Excel and just didn't get it working. The comments about Numbers not being good at making a quick plot are telling -- a program aimed at consumer use really should be good at that simple plots. But that would have ended up looking like Deltagraph, or JMP, or even Minitab.

By the way, if people want a free package that does plots really well (as well as curve fitting, modeling, .....) they should look at R, <cran.r-project.org>.

 

[Naimfan]

Wait a minute......

"If you know what an "average" is, then you should know what 'error bars' are...even though it isn't taught usually...." So how on earth should we know what 'error bars' are if they're not usually taught?

I think the point is that Numbers was never intended to be a drop-in replacement for Excel, nor was Pages ever intended to be a replacement for Word. And I think that's reflected in Apple's own statements as well as in the retail price.

 

[savar]

I don't think it'll ever be Excel standard. Excel is one of the two products from Redmond that actually shine (the other being Exchange). Numbers is aimed at an occasional user more than anything.

What!? Excel is awful. It's obviously very useful for a lot of people (literally billions of dollars on wall street are tracked with nothing other than an excel spreadsheet) but its such a terrible application. It's broken in so many ways. Sure it gets the job done, but it's such a PITA to use.

Just to name a few

1) Windowing works unlike any other app on Windows. Some spreadsheets open into the same window, some open into a new window. No way to tell which will happen.

2) Ctrl+Tab does the wrong thing. It cycles through open documents in that window. It should be cycling through worksheets in the current document. (That's how it works in every tabbed app out there.)

3) Copy/paste works unlike any other app. If you copy, then type something, then try to paste...nothing happens. Many actions will empty the pasteboard even though they shouldn't.

4) Can't undo past a save point. If you save your sheet, it wipes out your undo history. This one in particular has bit me in the ass before. The others are annoying but I've lost work due to accidentally hitting the wrong key. I know that's how really old apps used to work, but no other mainstream app in the last 10 years still does that.

Anyway, there's nothing better that I've found. As screwed up as Excel is, it still has a lot of features that I can't easily get elsewhere -- especially since I have no control over what software they install on our laptops at work.

 

[savar]

Many new Mac users are scientists and engineers (I am one); hopefully, as the portion of Apple's market share that we represent grows, Apple will be willing to further develop Numbers into a more capable spreadsheet program for scientific and engineering use. Until then, the resource costs or doing so evidently outweigh the potential benefits in Apple's opinion.

Keep in mind that the "i" prefix (in iWork, iLife, iMac) has come to mean "consumer-level". The "Pro" suffix is attached to the highend stuff (Final Cut Pro, MacPro, MacbookPro).

Apple isn't always 100% consistent with these naming standards, but it does imply that this isn't commercial office software. As you mention, it's aimed at home users mostly, with a focus on streamlining common tasks and also adding a [marketable] aesthetic.

Having said that, I'd be surprised if there isn't more robust software in the pipeline, either as incremental updates to iWork (most likely) or as an additional product line aimed at professionals.

 

[Naimfan]

To Savar....

That's a very good point!