Having persevered for 12 months using Numbers I have decided to bite the bullet and go back to Excel or, at least, a similar spreadsheet.
I need the ability to delete identical rows, sort a row/column selection, etc. none of which works in Nunbers.
Other than Excel are there any others that people can recommend? I'm disinclined to pay £120 for Excel but if that is the only option, so be it.
iMac 27" 5K, macOS 10.14
Excel is a good member of the Mac community. Here's the banner I see at the top of the Mac App Store today.
However, I do think you are giving Numbers short shrift in saying it isn't easy to sort selections or remove duplicates there. In my experience, that is not the case.
I've found Excel indispensable for working with large data sets. But Numbers, with its table centric design, is more convenient for lots of other projects. In any case, it's not an either/or decision. I use both.
SG
I recommend Excel. It's really good on the Mac (and on iOS). The cost of a subscription for 5 devices is a couple of lattes a month. It's frequently updated, so any security holes are plugged promptly.
However, I'm puzzled by this statement:
ability to delete identical rows, sort a row/column selection, etc.
none of which works in Nunbers.
Where do you get the idea these things don't work in Numbers? Are you using an ancient version of the app?
SG
Hi SG,
Thanks for the input, I am tending towards that and, as you say, the cost of a couple of Lattes!
When I used Excel I could import rows of data, select all or some of the data and tell Excel to delete rows where a number of cells had the same data. I cannot find the same functionality in Numbers
Remove duplicate rows was actually added fairly recently in excel as a built in function (I think it was 2007, might have been earlier,). Before that we either used a macro, or we used formulas to identify the duplicate rows using functions like countif. Then sorting and deleting the rows that matched our criteria. I have done this in numbers a number of times withi no issue. You could also use AppleScript in numbers to do the same thing we did using excel via macros,
but if you are already familiar with excel and feel more comfortable using it, it is more feature filled than numbers er end users.
jason
exactly, I have both (I forked out for the full install excel, since i prefer to automate alot of my stuff with VBA), and for data analysis tasks with tens of thousands of rows, excel is the way to go.,
Home budget, Cub scout and boy scout fundraisers and other stuff, is all done in numbers on an ipad.
Always have the right tool for the job available.
Glad you are happy with your solution
Jason
Thanks guys. I’ve now signed up to Excel and am much happier.
A no-cost option you could check out would be LibreOffice.
The Categories feature in Numbers also makes it really easy to find and remove duplicates.
SG
Absolutely agree. Numbers will still be used but for a lot of pure data work, Excel will be the first choice.
Excel on Mac
