numbers is very slow with large spreadsheets - what can i do?

Sluggish performance can be related to the types of formulas you have in your document. Many functions do not recalculate very time you make a change to your document. But some functions, sometimes called "volatile" formulas, recalculate every time you make a change, no matter how small. These include OFFSET, INDIRECT, RAND, ROW, and NOW. There are a few others. If you have a lot of those in your document, you may see slower than expected performance.

In my experience Numbers generally handles 1200 rows or so without too much problem if I don't use volatile functions.

However, Excel is much better suited than Numbers to handling larger datasets (in the many thousands, even tens of thousands, of rows). Excel for the Mac I find to be an excellent app. If you routinely have to work with large sets of data you might consider using Excel for those projects. Unlike the "open" Excel clones, Excel works well on iOS as well.

SG

one of the problems might be with how many calculations there are in the workbook. Every time you update something the program seems to go through and recalculates all the formulas. numbers has never really been good with larger data sets, always been slower than excel was with them (although i do bring excel to its knees with the volumes i have at work).

If you are just looking at getting away from excel, you can also try open office, which is 95% of excel features most people use.

Jason

" i have been using excel for very large ss for years and it is much better no doubt"

I wouldn't say Excel is better than Numbers in everything. It very much depends on what you are doing. The Numbers table-centric design (where it is easy to have multiple tables on one sheet) makes a lot of things easier to do in Numbers than in Excel. A simple example is the Calendar template at File > New in your menu. Not so easy to replicate something like that in Excel! But if you're working with large datasets Excel is the better tool.

SG