I opened an Excel workbook in Numbers on my iMac and did some work on it. When I saved and closed it, the size was 1.1 MB although the original Excel file was only 163 KB.
Why would it become so large - I did not add anything to it, just an entry of a line or so?
I would like to start using my iMac rather than Microsoft Office but find it a bit disconcerting if files are going to 'grow' in this way!
Numbers is not an Excel clone. When you open an Excel file in Numbers, you are not working in that original Excel file. Numbers translates the Excel document into the Numbers internal .numbers document format and all changes occur in that file. If you export that .numbers content back to Excel, another translation occurs between the document formats and that would explain the much larger exported Excel document.
If you want to work on that Excel document in its native document format, and without translation, then you will need Office365, Office 2019 for Mac, or LibreOffice v6.3.0.4 (Yosemite or later) Calc.
Numbers is not an Excel clone. When you open an Excel file in Numbers, you are not working in that original Excel file. Numbers translates the Excel document into the Numbers internal .numbers document format and all changes occur in that file. If you export that .numbers content back to Excel, another translation occurs between the document formats and that would explain the much larger exported Excel document.
If you want to work on that Excel document in its native document format, and without translation, then you will need Office365, Office 2019 for Mac, or LibreOffice v6.3.0.4 (Yosemite or later) Calc.
Apple's applications inject considerable bloat during the export translation process. LibreOffice is quite efficient after 34 years of evolution from the StarOffice days.
A really tiny Numbers doc was 121KB, the same exact thing saved as .ods in LibreOffice was 20 KB, saved as .xlsx was 9 KB.
Thanks, Apple doesn't need to worry about bloat, after all they recently sold Macs with 2 whole GB of RAM! ;)
Numbers file size
