Agreed ! Anyone who has to deal with large lists that need to be summarized, is left hi and dry without an equivalent to the Pivot Table tool in Numbers. For my part, I'm not buying iWorks '08 untill there's an update available with that function. Let's just hope it comes out before Microsoft releases their updated Office suite...
I'm not just astonished, I'm shocked, flabbergasted, and apoplectic that Pivot Table functionality wasn't included. I mean even Neooffice has this! How hard can this be?
It was with a great deal of reluctance that I bought Office when I got my Mac 2 yrs. ago. I've been waiting for the spreadsheet so that I can dump Office, and now this. How disappointing!
Here's what Walt Mossberg said in today's WSJ: "For real spreadsheet jockeys, however, Numbers is wimpier than Excel. It has only about half as many functions for making calculations and doesn't do pivot tables."
Ouch! The wimp factor. That's the handle that drove "41" up the wall.
Try using the sumif function. It works easily by selecting the row or column to do the lookup from and is very easy to setup if you aren't a pivot table expert.
Yeah, but have you been able to do it natively on a date range? I'm trying to do it based on Months but in order to do it I have to create a hidden column and extract the month into it. Not as elegant as I would hope . . .
If Pivot Table-like function would be included in the next upgrade I would immediately back to use it. Now it is just waste of time. And the help is just for nothing. 😟 Disappointed!
Szimi
I'm quite sure that you are using the english version on a system whose decimal separator is the comma.
Apple wrote the english version with the point as decimal separator.
So in the english product, the operands separator is the comma while it is the semi-colon with our decimal comma.
As I already wrote, I will ask Apple for a revised version adjusting the delimiter used in the "Insert functions" tool but I'm not sure that it wold be doable for the Help.
Maybe the easier track would be to deliver an english-with-semicolons version.
Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE samedi 15 septembre 2007 08:52:31)
people, search on pivot tables. If you really are a power user of spreadsheets, you should be able to recreate the similar functionality of a pivot table without the overhead of a background DB file that Excel creates. (Ever notice you have to refresh the table every time the data changes? Its using a Jet DB engine, same as Access to handle it I believe.)
Also, this is the "Spreadsheet for the rest of us." As Mr. Jobs put it in his Keynote. The "rest of us", don't use Pivot tables.
Oh, and yes, I already posted a way of doing this in the groups here, search around and I believe you can find it.
Sorry if it comes across wrong, but I think many many people are sooo wanting to abandon MS that they are upset that the version 1.0 of a brand new product isn't beating the pants off a program with over twenty years of development. Kinda losing their point of view on this one people are..
I agree. I too wish to abandon Excel, but for the tougher stuff, we have to use it.
Just make sure we get the message to Apple that this indeed deserves the attention it needs to bring it into a very useful product. I'm sure people would love to see this thing grow into something very serious.
+powerful pivot tables (from Excel files and OLAP cubes)+
+macro capability+
+database connection+
speed
For pivot tables, I have no advice.
For macro I agree
for database connection I agree too (mainly because that implies the availability of a database application 😉 )
for the speed I agree too.
