Will Numbers improve soon?

[constructionist]

Having invested in moving a lot of our business budgets over to Numbers, I'm finding that while Numbers has some nice features, the slow performance is a killer. It is especially slow in dealing with links and textual dereferences from one sheet to another; also slow with categorized tables.

Are there any clues what priority Apple may be giving to improving the performance of Numbers? Will there even be an iWork '10?

/c

 

[Gregg2]

It would be nice to be able to predict the future. Then we wouldn't have to make the mistakes we've made in the past. I sure haven't read anything about an upgrade to Numbers. ...not that I read everything. Are you already using iWork '09?

I'm more concerned about some other numbers improving.... like the unemployment rate, the deficit, etc.

 

[miles01110]

Are there any clues what priority Apple may be giving to improving the performance of Numbers? Will there even be an iWork '10?

Nobody knows. If Numbers is bothering you, try Office 08. Excel is much snappier.

 

[maflynn]

Nobody knows. If Numbers is bothering you, try Office 08. Excel is much snappier.

That's a first, I've never heard that excel is snappier on the mac, quite the contrary.

 

[Gregg2]

really!

I didn't use Numbers much before the 30-day trial expired. I use Excel, and I wouldn't call it "snappy". If it is indeed snappier, then Numbers is a real dog!

 

[Ashka]

The first version of Numbers was in iWork'08. The second version in iWork'09 had many of the changes asked for in the feedback sent to Apple.
Can we expect the same number of changes in the third version in iWork'10? I'd like to think so but who knows.
I use Numbers every day and much prefer it to excel, which I used for far too many years.
In saying that, I do not think Numbers is suitable for heavy business use.

 

[mysterytramp]

Having invested in moving a lot of our business budgets over to Numbers, I'm finding that while Numbers has some nice features, the slow performance is a killer. It is especially slow in dealing with links and textual dereferences from one sheet to another; also slow with categorized tables.

Are there any clues what priority Apple may be giving to improving the performance of Numbers? Will there even be an iWork '10?

/c

A few threads on this board have speculated that iWork '10 will arrive in January. The prevailing wisdom is that Apple will want to release new apps that take advantage of Grand Central.

In the meantime, one potential way to speed up Numbers might be -- and this might really suck -- to redesign your spreadsheets so one sheet only has a single bottleneck. Put a categorized table on one sheet, the textual dereference on a single sheet. It helped a bit on a project I worked on, but I've got no benchmarks to prove anything, just a suspicion.

If you've got a lot of data, redesigning can be a pain, although Numbers seems to be pretty good at maintaining links as tables move from sheet to sheet.

mt