Very slow performance. Numbers is pokey, that's for sure.

Maybe so.... Try this test for us and see what happens:

-Open a new numbers file
-Select the "blank" template
-Enter a "1" in cell A1
-Drag down to row 45, then across to column' M' to fill the table with ones.
-Click the dollar sign in the tool bar.
-Count how long the beach ball spins.
I get 35 seconds on my 2GHz G5
-Open Activity Monitor and see how much memory it is using
I show 397 MB Real memory used with no other files open. That's over 1/2 MB per cell... must be some pretty fancy "$1.00"s in there.

I also tried it on my brand-new fresh out of the box Core 2 Duo mini: 16 seconds. Yep. It's THAT slow. If you want real excitement (like as exciting as watching paint dry), try it with 1400 x 6 cells. Whoo-wee!!! I literally had to go to bed and let it run all night to see if it would even finish charting (it did).

Try it yourself and let us know the result. I do not think it is a problem with my configuration.

17 secs on an Intel 2GhzCDuo iMac with 1Gig RAM
Not so good!

I agree.
It is quite slow in my Powerbook G4 with 1GB Ram especially if compared to NeoOffice and Excel 04.
Yet it is a great App and for £ 55 is a bloody bargain! MS Office is much more expensive and does offer more but I probably use 20% of Excel potential.

I hope they will release updates and patches to improve the speed.

I will also like a freeze pan that I can find anywhere. This is my biggest complain so far. I can cope with the speed for the use I do of it.

For me it took 16 seconds on a MacBook 2GHz with 2Gb RAM !
I did the same test to switch formats with percentage, and value and so on, and this was instant ! Only when switching to € format does take an eternity !

Seems a big bug to me (perhaps it is only related to international users and US systems don't have this lag ?)

Stef

Yep, same here on iMac core 2 2Ghz, with 2GB RAM. Numbers is very slow.

Typing is very hard, selecting cells is lag.

My experience is that the speed and stability of Numbers with large spreadsheets is poor.

FYI ... I'm running a new MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz with 2 GB of ram.

Initial startup after a system restart is not bad (9.5 seconds). Excel clocks in at 10.5 seconds.

On subsequent application restarts, Numbers opens in 1.5 seconds, Excel opens in 3.0 seconds.

Ok, so I'm thinking that Numbers is looking pretty good.

*Speed with a Smaller File ...*

Then, I try to sort a pretty basic product sales spreadsheet for my company. I export a tab delimited text file out of a 4D database that has 570 rows and 17 columns. To open the text file in Numbers ... 4.2 seconds. Excel opened the file instantaneously ... only gripe here is that I had to click "Finish" in the text import Wizard, but even with that, it only took 2.1 seconds.

Sort everything based on the information in a column in Numbers' "Basic" style ... 2.2 seconds. In Excel ... 0.6 second.

*Speed with a Larger File ...*

Ok, so now ... switching to a file with 14,205 rows and 8 columns.

To open the file: Numbers ... 31.5 seconds; Excel (even with having to click on the "Finish" Wizard button) ... 2.7 seconds.

To sort by a column (zip code, in this case): Numbers ... 12.0 seconds; Excel ... 0.8 seconds.

However, I then noticed that that column that I was sorting in numbers had been imported in number format ("00961" imported as "961"), so I tried to convert the column into text format ... 10.3 seconds. Then, I tried to sort on that column again ... 3 minutes later I forced quit Numbers. I tried this two additional times with the same result. Also, I've tried similar tasks with several large files and had similar results ... the application hangs when faced with big tasks.

My conclusion is that Numbers is fine for smaller files. However, it is a real bomb with larger files.

Hello

It seems that like the others apps included in iWork this first version of Numbers is not optimized.
We may hope that it will be in verion 2.
At this time, from my point of view, the main thing to do is to kill quickly the numerous bugs in localised versions.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE lundi 13 août 2007 8:17:29)

Yep -- it as 2-3 times as slow as the VERY slow Excel 2004. This was what I feared most. It is not really usable for me simply because of how slow it is. When I tab to other cells, I have no way of knowing where I will end up as it cannot keep with me at all, so I keep pasting info in the wrong cells all the time. I guess one would need a computer of around 2GHz at least and with at least 1 GB of RAM in order to be able to work in this program, which I otherwise like. I noticed though that Pages were almost usable now thanks to some speed improvements.

I would have liked macro support, but the files I need macro support for never worked with Excel 2004 either as the Windows created macros were not possible to be run in Excel for Mac.

Even the Apple website and these forums are slow these days -- I actually rather go to other sites for Apple news as it takes too long to load Apple pages in Safari ... . /Jerry

After countless forced quits I have managed to load 4 Sheets each with a table of up 850 rows doing a very simple add and subtraction of two giving a total...

I have made some links between tables so input on one sheet has an effect on the sheet receiving the data....

To open the document now takes 57 seconds, to input data to be used by the other sheet can take over 4 mins or crashes out...

To scroll down one column changing a formula/number can take over a minute...

To sort a column of more the 20 rows into a list usually results in a crash, as does changing font, font size and if you change the formula in a cell and attempt to drag down into the sorted cells this results in a crash...

Another weird one is on the sorted list add a fill and its applied to all the "hidden cells" it doesn't do it every time..

The above has been tried on several high end machines with max ram installed mainly dual G5's with high end graphics cards....

All works well up to a max twenty rows and 3 columns....

Are intel uses having similar issues or are they common across the the whole range...

1 GB isn't enough. I'm running with 1.5 GB and a 1.8 G5 & it's taking 38 seconds or so to do the test Gary Evans described above.

Well, according to the comments here, it seems like computer power isn't the solution ... hope we does not have to wait until version 2 for a quicker Numbers ... .

Stef-
the lag is there when switching cell format to currency whether you use $ or Euro.

I think comparisons with Excel are warranted as many of the uses of the software overlaps. Many people expect to do similar things with the two applications and the makers announce that you could do many similar things (not that they compare with eachother). In certain respects, like in what functionality one could expect, it may be unfair to assume both software should be or even aim at being as good as the other. So comparison in certain respects are warranted and in others, not. /Jerry

Yes. I think if Apple is going to make comparisons to Excel, it is reasonable to do so here.

See Apple's most recently posted comparison here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306268

GW Schreyer wrote:
Gary, Numbers is slow, but NOT THAT slow. Something is broken in your configuration.

No numbers IS that slow. You haven't used it with any sizable spreadsheet. I filled 1000 cells with dependent calculations. On excel running in rosetta, it is 25 times faster.

no kidding. numbers is 25 times slower than excel running in PowerPC emulation.