[robin_reala]

I genuinely enjoy using Numbers in a way that I just don’t with Excel. Probably more indicative of the level I’m using it at, but for me it fills the gap where I just want to do some quick manipulations of CSV data but not enough that it’s worth writing a script.

[diegof79]

I like the feature allowing multiple tables to be in the same spreadsheet. It’s a convenient and obvious solution that, for some reason, Excel or Google Sheets don’t have. Does anybody know the history behind it? Is there any kind of patent around that UI feature that only Numbers (AFAIK) has?

[kccqzy]

Google Sheets does have this feature. But it was fairly recent. Numbers had it for a long time and in any case I still prefer the implementation in Numbers. In Numbers, data is referenced through these tables exclusively while getting rid of sheet-level references; tables in Google Sheets do not go that far. My mental model for tables in Numbers is just sheets but relocatable and multiple can be viewed at the same time. My mental model for tables in Sheets is just it helps me with formatting and with referencing the entirety of the data like an upgraded named range.

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/14239833?hl=en

[wtallis]

The "tables" feature supported by Google Sheets and Excel is similar, but definitely not the same thing. Tables in those programs just ascribe special meaning to specified ranges of a single shared row:column space (what one would otherwise be tempted to call a "table") that defaults to behaving as effectively infinite.

In Numbers, you have multiple tables that are entirely separate row:column spaces that can be resized and positioned arbitrarily and independently, with small finite extent by default such that they fit on screen. That UI makes the capability to have multiple tables on one sheet more discoverable, and easier to comprehend what it's doing. When you drag and drop a CSV file onto a Numbers sheet, it creates a new table rather than populating cells in an existing table. When you resize column A in one table, it doesn't affect the column A of any other table.

That finite vs seemingly-infinite distinction is a fundamental difference in conceptualizing what a spreadsheet is, which can have pretty far-reaching consequences. I've encountered programs with a "CSV export" feature that generates a CSV file that's more or less what you'd expect to get if you wrote a report in a single Excel sheet, and then exported that to CSV: you get a file that contains tabular data embedded in it, but so polluted with unrelated text and unstructured metadata that having it as CSV format barely helps with parsing and you'd be better off trying to extract data from HTML.

[alwillis]

This feature goes back to Lotus Improv, a spreadsheet that ran on NeXTStep back in the day.

The Wikipedia article even mentions Numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv

[MartinMond]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv

[xattt]

I always thought that Apple’s productivity suite was the same app but with different UI wrappers.

Tables in Pages behave similar to Numbers spreadsheets. Pages layout mode is very similar to Keynote. Data vis in Keynote is the same as Numbers.

[kccqzy]

Yeah you can do the same with Microsoft. They have OLE. Apple had OpenDoc in the 1990s for that. It's not a new idea and it's certainly an idea that makes a whole lot of sense.

[nhinck3]

With some functionality that differs to the tables in excel?

Because you can have multiple tables in a single sheet in excel, but I guess the columns filters don't play nicely with multiple tables.

[diegof79]

Yes, it’s different from Excel tables. @wtallis probably explained it better, but I’ll give it another shot:

A “spreadsheet” or tab in Numbers is like a canvas where you can put tables, text boxes, , charts or shapes.

The classic spreadsheet is one of these table objects. If you want it to behave like a classic spreadsheet, you can have a single table object that takes the whole canvas; otherwise, you can have multiple. Each is like a spreadsheet with columns and rows; formulas can refer to cells in other tables.

It’s handy to create dashboard-like views or visually organize your work.

In other words, Excel tables are a special region in your spreadsheet; Numbers tables are individual spreadsheets on a canvas.

[hk1337]

I feel like you used to be able to do this in Excel, as sheets instead of tables, that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

[wtallis]

You might be remembering the 90s-era MDI user interface where you could have multiple documents open as sub-windows within the parent Excel application window.

[alabastervlog]

Pretty much the entire suite of 1st party Apple programs are my favorite in their categories, across platforms.

Their "office" apps remind me of the lightweight non-LibreOffice options on Linux, like Gnumeric and Abiword, but better integrated, less janky, and I've never once seen any of them crash. I like that I can forget I even have them open in the background, they're so light. Which should be the case for practically everything given how powerful modern computers are, but, unfortunately, Electron exists.

[pbh101]

A really nice thing I noticed about Pages is that if you use the defaults, your document turns out very nicely typeset with zero extra effort, at least to my untrained eyes. Which you’d expect from Apple and maybe any word processor, but I can’t say I’ve had that baseline experience with others.

[kstrauser]

Same for me. I cringe when I have to resort to MS Office to deal with some janky external doc or another. Excel has a gazillion functions. Numbers has less coverage, but it implements them pleasantly in a Mac-assed Mac app.

Same with Pages vs Word. I'm sure has power features some people can't live without. I can live without ‘em, in exchange for getting an ergonomic app that runs nicely on my OS.

I'd reach for Pages every time over Word, which, ironically, in my opinion is not very good at processing words. (99% of the time I use iA Writer in a Markdown workflow. If I specifically need WYSIWYG for something, it’s Pages every time.)

[isomorph]

I'm also a Numbers fan. I actually like using Pages too. When I use Microsoft Office, I remember its power but I also find it relatively difficult to use.

[tzs]

Pages greatly confused me the first time I tried to use it, several years ago. That's because it included a bunch of templates for different kinds of documents, and when you created a new document from one of those templates the document was full of text and images.

That text was Lorem ipsum [1]. I had never seen that before and assumed that I had somehow gotten the templates for some other language installed with my English Pages install.

I then spent a few hours trying to figure out how to change template language settings or install English templates.

I eventually copies some of the text and Googled it, hoping to find someone else who had this problem and had found the fix and then learned about Lorem ipsum.

Nowadays when you create a document from the templates that come with Pages the placeholder text is in your language and is usage instructions for the template.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum

[czk]

ChatGPT killed Lorem Ipsum

[c0nsumer]

Same here. For just knocking up models of stuff I find it both nicer than Excel (and included with the OS) and works... better... for me than Google Sheets.

It's just convenient and works.

[qsort]

I use macOS and the rest of the pseudo-office suite. It's okay. But Numbers is just bad. It takes forever to open files and perform even trivial operations. I do a lot of data engineering and people's "creative" usage of Excel is the bane of my existence, but there's a reason why it's used everywhere: it's that good. None of the clones even hold a candle to the real thing.

[Synaesthesia]

It depends on your use case. I wouldn't use numbers for anything large or complex but it's really quite a pleasure for smaller things, like invoices or planning.

[fkyoureadthedoc]

My main use of Numbers is when I open a CSV file and it's messed up in Excel, I then open it in Numbers and export an Excel which fixes the issues.

[WillAdams]

It is _so_ close to being a replacement for Lotus Improv/Quantrix Financial Modeler/Flexisheet.

Just held back by the need to import/export Excel files.

[oidar]

It does import/export Excel.

[WillAdams]

Yes, that is what precludes it being a Lotus Improv, et al. replacement, it is oriented towards a 2D structure, rather than requiring that the user tear off and label specific axes one at a time, which was what made Lotus Improv such a breakthrough app.

[sgt]

Excel is horrible. Functionality is great (it's packed with features), but it's just so clunky and slow. So I have to agree, Numbers feels like a light weight Excel that meets my demands as well.

[pbh101]

If you are using significant amounts of data, Excel even on Mac is light years ahead of Numbers I’ve found. And probably still slower than Excel on Windows. My experience was using pivot tables with 80k-100k rows and maybe 20 columns. Excel was instant and Numbers took dozens of seconds of UI completely frozen to update the table.