Numbers (i.e., iWork'08) unbearably slow?

[s57]

Has anybody had the same experience that Numbers is extremely slow for certain tasks? For example, it takes several minutes to change the format for a column in a 1000 row table from, say, one to two digits, or change from number to currency format.

I generally really like Numbers, but the performance is really not acceptable under some circumstances. Admittedly, it runs fine on my quad-core Mac Pro, but at home, on my iMac G5 it's pushing my patience to the limit (don't even get me started on how it performs on my old Powerbook G5...)

Any insight as to whether this a common problem or maybe only one for PowerMacs would be helpful.

 

[jayellpi]

I am having the same problem with numbers

I too am having problems with numbers running very very slow. At first I thought there was something wrong with the MacBook Pro, but everything else seems to run fast enough. Numbers was working ok earlier, but for some reason it has just slowed to a crawl. I would be interested in finding out if others are having similar problems. If there is a solution out there please help.

 

[mysterytramp]

Where I've seen Numbers performance degrade is when it needs to fetch a lot of data from another table or another sheet to produce a result. Otherwise, I've had no real issues with performance (Mac mini, 1.66 GHz Core Duo, 1 G RAM, SL).

If that's your problem, you might be able to redesign the spreadsheet, keeping as much data as possible in as few tables/sheets as possible. It might lead to spaghetti spreadsheet design, but it might give you acceptable performance.

I really hope Apple addresses this in the next Numbers upgrade.

mt