msrdnr

Q: No XIRR function with today's update?

I am amazed that Apple did not extend this simple functionality to Numbers. Without it, Numbers cannot compete with Excel - and I cannot remove Office from my Mac. Very disappointing.

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on Jul 25, 2012 5:43 PM

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Q: No XIRR function with today's update?

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  • by Wayne Contello,

    Wayne Contello Wayne Contello Jul 27, 2012 8:05 AM in response to msrdnr
    Level 6 (19,416 points)
    iWork
    Jul 27, 2012 8:05 AM in response to msrdnr

    Not sure what you want anyone to say here.  As suggested before:

     

    Use the Feedback tool. It's your best option to effect change.

     

     

    Noone in the this forum is developer for iWork so none of us can make the change.  You have to request the feature.


  • by Barry,

    Barry Barry Jul 27, 2012 12:30 PM in response to msrdnr
    Level 7 (32,697 points)
    iWork
    Jul 27, 2012 12:30 PM in response to msrdnr

    I don't think anyone in this thread has claimed Apple or its products to be 'perfect'. There have been suggestions that a finite possibility exists that you are mistaken regarding the target audience for Numbers, statements that there is a product available (Excel) that may fit your needs more precisely, and directions to the most effective route to use for your request (Provide Numbers Feedback) if you want this function included in future versions of Numbers.

     

    Continued 'griping' in this user-to-user environment 'is irrational and unproductive' (and not, to my reading at least, within the TOU for the site).

     

    Regards,

    Barry

     

    Re: "That phrase is meaningless."

    Perhaps. But I read it as a nod to a now-deceased Mac user of note. I doubt very much Jerry meant to say 'non-zero possibility,' which would have been just as redundant, but without the included association.

    B

  • by Jerrold Green1,

    Jerrold Green1 Jerrold Green1 Jul 27, 2012 12:58 PM in response to msrdnr
    Level 7 (30,001 points)
    Jul 27, 2012 12:58 PM in response to msrdnr

    msrdnr wrote:

     

    ...

     

    You are using the phrase "finite possibility" incorrectly. That phrase is meaningless because the alternative would be "infinite possibilty." You mean to say "There is a non-zero possibility."

    My use of the term can be found in the dictionary.

     

    finite |ˈfīnīt|adjective1 having limits or bounds:


    not infinitely small: one's chance of winning may besmall, but it is finite.

     

     

    Jerry

  • by msrdnr,

    msrdnr msrdnr Jul 27, 2012 1:02 PM in response to Jerrold Green1
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Apple Music
    Jul 27, 2012 1:02 PM in response to Jerrold Green1

    Yes, and that's the opposite of what you intended to say.

  • by Jerrold Green1,

    Jerrold Green1 Jerrold Green1 Jul 27, 2012 1:09 PM in response to msrdnr
    Level 7 (30,001 points)
    Jul 27, 2012 1:09 PM in response to msrdnr

    I said what I intended to say. If you want to take me literally, that's your privilege. I was trying not to be blunt.

     

    Jerry

  • by Barry,

    Barry Barry Jul 27, 2012 1:32 PM in response to msrdnr
    Level 7 (32,697 points)
    iWork
    Jul 27, 2012 1:32 PM in response to msrdnr

    "Yes, and that's the opposite of what you intended to say."

     

    Hardly. Jerry's intended meaning seems a close match to that in the the example offered by the dictionary entry:

     

    not infinitely small: one's chance of winning may be small, but it is finite.

     

    Regards,

    Barry

  • by msrdnr,

    msrdnr msrdnr Jan 23, 2013 6:18 PM in response to msrdnr
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Apple Music
    Jan 23, 2013 6:18 PM in response to msrdnr

    Six months later and still no update to iWorks. Four years since Numbers 2009.

     

    Bizarre, but I believe I've figured it out. Office is of course the heart of Microsoft's business. Selling devices is the heart of Apple's business. I believe there is a tacit, maybe even an explicit, agreement between the two companies whereby Apple intentionally keeps its iWorks suite inferior to Office in exchange for the promise of Microsoft to continue developing software for the Mac and now the iPad apparently. Even though Microsoft is stepping on Apple's toes with the Surface, I guess Apple believes getting Office on Mac and the iOS devices is more important.

  • by Badunit,

    Badunit Badunit Jan 24, 2013 8:39 PM in response to msrdnr
    Level 6 (11,705 points)
    iTunes
    Jan 24, 2013 8:39 PM in response to msrdnr

    Back to the original question about XIRR, you can get around that problem by creating a table that contains every day of the period in question. The table can automatically fill in the income/withdrawal data for each date from your original table (using the SUMIF function). Then you use IRR on that table to get the result.  A little more work but doable. This workaround was mentioned 1/2 a year ago and discounted as having "too many zero entries". So it isn't a matter of "can't be done" it is more a matter of "don't want to do it that way."

     

    And I, too, am looking forward to a new release of iWork apps.  Been looking forward to it for over 2 years now.

  • by msrdnr,

    msrdnr msrdnr Feb 14, 2013 12:07 PM in response to Badunit
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Apple Music
    Feb 14, 2013 12:07 PM in response to Badunit

    Okay, here is the latest, for anyone interested.

     

    The decision not to upgrade Numbers has nothing to do with Apple believing it's okay as is. It's all about a careful dance with Microsoft.

     

    Today, an analyst calculated that Microsoft could earn about $2.5 billion by putting a full-blown Office on the iPad. But for the time being Microsoft has declined to do so, and that's because Microsoft is trying to preserve the hugely profitable Windows franchise. If Office is only on Windows-based machines like the Surface, then customers, especially business customers, will have a reason to buy a Windows-based machine. If customers can get the same Office on an iPad, they'll buy and iPad and therefore will not buy Windows.

     

    Microsoft earns about $23 billion per year from Windows. They don't want to risk the $23 billion to earn $2.5 billion.

     

    It's the same for Apple in reverse. If Apple competes with Office by making fully-developed versions of Pages and Numbers, then Microsoft is less likely to write Office for the iPad, and at least some customers will have less incentive to buy an iPad and more incentive to buy a Windows-based machine.

     

    Thus, the whole thing with adding the XIRR function to Numbers is really driven by Apple's desire to sell more hardware and Microsoft's desire to protect Windows.

  • by Badunit,

    Badunit Badunit Feb 14, 2013 2:54 PM in response to msrdnr
    Level 6 (11,705 points)
    iTunes
    Feb 14, 2013 2:54 PM in response to msrdnr

    So what you are saying is that Apple is purposely neutering the iPad so that their competitor (Microsoft) will help them get more customers?? The presence of a new version f iWork isn't going to have that much effect on the sales of Office for the iPad, if Microsoft ever makes it.

     

    The question about XIRR was about the Mac version of Numbers, not the iPad version. Microsoft already makes Office for the Mac and they continue to upgrade it so there is no careful dance going on in that respect. If Microsoft quit making Office for Mac, the open source Office clones would take on that task for them. Micorosft would lose revenue and Apple would be perfectly fine.

  • by msrdnr,

    msrdnr msrdnr Feb 14, 2013 3:02 PM in response to Badunit
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Apple Music
    Feb 14, 2013 3:02 PM in response to Badunit

    It's not neutering the iPad. It's neutering Numbers. Apple is willing to neuter Numbers to induce Microsoft to continue developing Office for the Mac and (Apple hopes) for the iPad. That's because many, many people will buy a Mac only if they can run Office. Similarly, Apple believes that many more people will buy iPads if the iPad can run office.

     

    You say that if Microsoft quite making Office for Mac then others would take it's place, but that's definitely not what Apple and Microsoft believe, nor is it my anecdotal experience. Most consumers will not swtich from a PC to a Mac unless they know they can run Microsoft Office on the Mac. This "dance" for the Mac platform has been going on a very long time.

  • by Badunit,

    Badunit Badunit Feb 14, 2013 3:53 PM in response to msrdnr
    Level 6 (11,705 points)
    iTunes
    Feb 14, 2013 3:53 PM in response to msrdnr

    We could argue back and forth on this one until the cows come home.  It is pure speculation either way.

  • by msrdnr,

    msrdnr msrdnr Apr 12, 2013 2:50 PM in response to msrdnr
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Apple Music
    Apr 12, 2013 2:50 PM in response to msrdnr

    The latest. Microsoft just announced that it will not release an iOS version of Office until October 2014. The assumption is that they're still trying to enhance sales of the Surface by making it preferable to the iPad (i.e., Surface has Office, iPad doesn't). However, many people think Microsoft is just compounding its original mistake, and that by the time Office becomes available for the iPad the market will have moved on. Certainly, with the explosion of mobile devices, very few of which run Windows, Office has already lost some of its inevitability.

     

    In any case, if Apple was trying to entice Microsoft to port Office to the iPad by keeping iWorks inferior to Office, maybe Apple will now throw up its hands and say "Enough!" and bring iWorks into prime time. I hope so.

  • by FinancialEngineer,

    FinancialEngineer FinancialEngineer Jun 29, 2013 2:57 AM in response to msrdnr
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jun 29, 2013 2:57 AM in response to msrdnr

    If you think having an XIRR function or any of the other Excel financial functions in Apple iWork Numbers is going to help you with financial analysis then you are dead wrong.

     

     

    There are large number of issues with financial functions in Excel and Microsoft hasn't bothered to address it as of today. Look, for investment analysis Excel offers 5 functions namely IRR, NPV, MIRR, XNPV and XIRR.

     

    NPV function is only capable of finding net present value of an ordinary annuity (an annuity with end of period payments) and you have to work around that to find net present value of annuity due (an annuity with start of period payments). I guess the NPV function in iWork Numbers is no better than Excel's. But finding net present value isn't as simple as finding the sum of discounted payments. There are many other aspects and issues to address that none of NPV functions in spreadsheet programs such as Excel, Numbers, OpenOffice Calc, LibreOffice Calc, Gnumeric and financial calculators such as TI BA II plus or HP 10B II can address.

     

    For starters, the period of the cash flows is left undefined whereas it would be desirable to be able to tell NPV that our period is a year, half-year, quarter, month, fortnight, week, day, hour or even a minute.

     

    The compounding frequency of interest is another issue that is left unaddressed in NPV function. For example we may want specify different compounding frequencies of interest such as yearly, semi-annually, quarterly, monthly, fortnightly, weekly, daily, hourly, minutely, secondly or even infinite.

     

    It would also help if we were able to mix together payments that have different time period associated to them. For example the first 12 cash flows being monthly cash flows, the next 365 cash flow being daily cash flows, the next 52 cash flows being weekly cash flows and/or the terminal cash flow goes on forever and has a never ending stream of payments.

     

    The full year discounting convention is the default in all of the NPV functions yet we would want to use other discounting conventions such as mid-year discounting as proposed by Office of management and budget at the White House.

     

    I can think of even more exotic options for NPV but I would keep those for my personal use.

     

    XIRR function in Excel has it's own problems since it makes use of XNPV function to find the IRR, and the faulty code in Excel XNPV leads to wrong results for XIRR. Even if Micorsoft went ahead and recoded it's five investment analysis functions, it will still leave out many features that one would want for serious financial analysis.

     

    I was going to ask here if Apple iWork Number permits development of 3rd party custom functions (UDF - user defined functions), if so then one would probably want to have the financial functions found in tadXL implemented for Apple iWork Numbers.

     

    There are over 60 investment analysis functions in tadXL adding another 35 for time value of money, interest factors and other functions

     

    The time value of money functions in Excel, iWork Numbers and other spreadsheet programs are almost useless. I am referring to RATE, NPER, PMT, PV & FV set of related functions. These functions only work for annuities that have payments in constant amounts and do not permit annuities that have payments that grow or shrink by a growth rate or increase and decrease by a constant money amount. tadXL addresses this and offers 6 TVM function with GRADIENT as the newest time value of money function. But then these 5 TVM function offer even more functionality such as being able to specify the period as a year, quarter, month, week, day, hour, biennial or any thing else. It also permits using a value of INF for NPER to specify never ending stream of payments so that one can find the present value, annuity payment and IRR of a perpetuity. These functions also allow you to specify different compounding frequencies of interest. You can specify for example that it is a deferred annity meaning that payments begin at a later date. And that growth of payments does not coincide with payment schedule.

     

    Complex is the word to define the financial functions in tadXL and I was told the guy who has researched and coded tadXL has been on medication for the last 20 years so that he does not relapse in to imaginary world where he sees angels, devils and the Lord.

     

    Message was edited by: FinancialEngineer

  • by msrdnr,

    msrdnr msrdnr Sep 11, 2013 8:25 AM in response to msrdnr
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Apple Music
    Sep 11, 2013 8:25 AM in response to msrdnr

    Another Apple product cycle with no upgrade to Numbers. With Microsoft intent on competing with Apple in the device category - delaying an iPad version of Office to stimulate sales of the Suface - I hoped that Apple might finally cut the cord and compete with Microsoft in the applications category. But apparently Apple remains unwilling to take that step, leaving Excel as the only game in town for serious spreadsheets. Bad for consumers.

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