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

The same slow performance here too on my macpro 2,66Ghz 5 gig ram.
For the short time i used numbers i had to force quit it three times.
I don't type fast but in numbers now and then faster than it's on my display.
After restarting numbers it seems to be gone for a while.

It seems as if Apple never tested Numbers for use with "large" amounts of data.

The very first thing I tried to do was import a list of data (about 250 rows and 2-3 columns) to make a chart. Any change I made took 20-30 seconds if not minutes. Based on a hour's usage, Numbers 1.0 doesn't seem to be able to handle "serious" data use. Anything more than the 10-15 rows of data that Jobs demoed at the Apple Event or that are shown on those video tutorials.

I guess the biggest mistake is too compare numbers with excel.

I would agree that Apple is good about launching something which is a bit pre-mature. In many ways I prefer this. I would rather get something now that provides a sense of direct rather than wait for something that is perfect months or a year later.

On a related note it is better for Apple to release early and get feedback. I saw a number of projects where the vendor did not have the same sense of direction as the customers. An early release let the customers provide feedback which caused major changes in the product on subsequent releases.

I do not have iWorks 08 yet but I will be buying. I have enjoyed using Pages and Keynote so I expect more of the same plus the addition of Numbers.

John Corey

yep. I notice similar sluggishness. I'm keen to switch a basic business accounting spreadsheet (150 rows) from Excel to Numbers, but I think the slight input lag will get to me. For some reason it's important the app feels snappy when I'm doing basic accounting. G4 dual 1.25 with 2 Gigs ram. I guess I'll have to stick to Excel for now.

Yes. Comparisons to Excel are not warranted, for better or worse. It does many many things very nicely as a spreadsheet app. It just so happens that one of the main things I would need it for is to work with "meaningful" amounts of data, in other words more than 20 rows of numbers (250-2500). I'm sure a version 1.0.1 or perhaps 2.0 will improve performance so that it doesn't ground to hault.

*On the other hand, Apple has a history of putting out fairly weak 1.0 software and then making some pretty quick improvements.*
I've been saying this for quite a few years. It's almost as if Apple throws out a little program saying, "Let's see what they make of this." Then the team sits back, watches to see how we use it, and then brings out the next version with features to help us use it that way.

Yes,it is slow with any reasonably large amout of data and just lacks too many essential features for me to use it. Neo Office is far more powerful in basic spreadsheet functionality

Forget the unfair comparisons to excel, numbers can't even keep up with AppleWorks!

I have a spreadsheet in Apple Works that I use to track revenue and profit for my business. I enter two numbers per day: Total Sales and Total Profit. There are 6 calculation columns that display 7 and 28 day running averages for sales, profit and margin each day. The spread sheet is about 1400 rows (one row per day). No special formatting, no formulas more complicated than if(), sum() and average().

In Appleworks:
Data entry: instant - as fast as I can type.
Create a line chart on 6 columns and 1400 rows: 5 seconds
Memory usage: 11 MB

In Numbers:
Data entry time: Spinning beachball for ~10 minutes after each keypress (yes, REALLY)
Create chart: Unknown, maybe not possible. (Still waiting after 1 hour of spinning beach ball and 100% processor usage)
Memory usage: 1009MB (yes, ONE GIG), plus 2GB VM file (!!!).

I mean, how sad - ONE HUNDRED times more memory usage and over ONE HUNDRED tomes SLOWER. Absolutely terrible. If I were the engineer on this project I would be absolutely ashamed of the performance.

Wow! That's absolutely astounding.

I was going to try downloading the demo just to work with Numbers, but I don't think I'll bother.

I hope others post more of these specific numbers (ho, ho) about Numbers. That's much more useful than just saying it's slow.

Rob

I've been saying this for quite a few years. It's almost as if Apple throws out a little program saying, "Let's see what they make of this." Then the team sits back, watches to see how we use it, and then brings out the next version with features to help us use it that way.

Actually, if the development team really listens and delivers the customer requested features, this is the best development process. Much better than developing it internally for years and trying to sell an unproven software with a feature set that might not meet customer's demands.

The incremental software process is like this:

* Step 1: develop a useful product. It might be less than perfect and have less than all thinkable features.
* Step 2: publish it as early as possible
* Step 3: collect user feedback
* Step 4: improve the product based on user feedback
* Step 5: Go To Step 2

If the interval is short enough (a month, three months, ...), then this incremental process quickly leads to a usable software with the features customers really need.

Gary, Numbers is slow, but NOT THAT slow. Something is broken in your configuration.

For me, entry is instantaneous, calculations are slow. Based on a simple test, it runs about 50 to 100x slower than Excel X.

- gws

To follow up on my own comment - I did a little more playing around and discovered that most of the performance hit comes when using currency formatting on cells.

Changing 1400 cells from "Auto" formatting to "Fixed" formatting with 2 decimal places takes 5 seconds (slow but bearable). Changing the same 1400 cells to "Currency" format takes over three minutes of spinning beachball.

I'm not sure why the addition of a dollar sign to the display would make such a big difference, but if I set all the columns in my spreadsheet to currency formatting the entire program is completely grinds to a halt. If I use fixed formatting it is still slow but at least does not take 5 minutes to change one cell.