What is the purpose of being able to duplicate tables on a sheet or "canvas"

Hi Joe,

Numbers vocabulary:

Spreadsheet is a short form of Spreadsheet Document, and refers to the entire document, Similar to the term "workbook" when talking about MS Excel.

A spreadsheet is made up of one or more Sheets. Each Sheet has a tab with its name, placed in a row at the top of the document window. Clicking a tab will bring its Sheet to the front.

Sheets are large sheets of 'canvas' on which are placed one or more objects. The objects may be Tables,, images, shapes, boxes to contain text, or charts.

Most Sheets contain at least one Table.

Cells on a table may contain entered data, or they may contain formulas that collect data from other cells and perform calculations on that data.

Most Numbers Tables are relatively small, nd are designed to carry out a specific task. A look at the Personal Budget template will give you one example of how these tables work together.

Sheet 1 of a document made from this template, named Transactions, is a Data collection Table (also named Transactions), with limited calculations done in the rightmost columns.

The second Sheet in this document contains a summary Table (Named Summary by category) that collects and sums data from Transactions, and lists the results beside the category names.

The piechart on this sheet gets its data from the Summary table, and plots that data as a circle graph.

So why duplicate (verb) Tables?

• Sometimes it's done because you want a second table that is exactly the same size as the one you are duplicating—for example, a table on which you will extract the data from several (but not all) rows of the original table. Starting with a duplicate of the original, and clearing the data from it (select all cells to be cleared, then press delete. Done.) is the quickest way to get one.
• Or you could want another table with the same (or similar number of columns, and a similar (but not the same number of rows. You could go to the Table button in the tool bar and insert another table, then resize it, or Duplicate the one you have and resize that.
• A reason for not choosing to duplicate a table could be that it takes about the same effort to add a column to the existing table, then separate that column from the rest of the table. When separated, it becomes a new table, to which you can easily add more columns and/or rows.

I am curious about how you managed to 'wind up with "many duplicates of your spreadsheet" (or, more likely, 'many duplicates of your main Table'). Can you provide a description of the actions that brought this about?

Regards,

Barry