What has been lost in Numbers 3.0 upgrade?

Got it, Thanks.

Jerry

Categories was very useful. Back to Excel, I suppose.

David

one more thing that i have noticed...

if you want to edit the contents of a cell, it looks like you have to do it "in the cell"

you used to be able to edit the contents in the status-bar kind of thing that stretched across the top of the table

when you've got a cell that contains a lot of text, having to do it inside a tiny little cell is incredibly annoying. its much easier when you can see all the text spread out in the status bar thing

i have noticed that they've now included a new status-bar type thing underneath the table, which will show the contents of whichever cell you click on, but the text doesn't seem to be selectable or editable from there.

recently it seems that apple are set out on a course which dumbs down their mac software so it replicates what we can do on an ipad or an iphone. they want the software to match across all the different platforms. that is a decent idea -- i like that idea. but who on earth does most of their spreadsheet work on a phone? Surely Apple should make a product like this primarily for the Mac, and then dumb it down for the phone, if they have to take features out. Why on earth are they taking features out of the Mac version?

i have already bought a rival companies software to replace the iOS7 versions of Calendar and Notes, and now i am thinking of going back to Microsoft Word and ExCel to replace Apple's new Pages and Number "downgrades".

Removal of the editable formula bar is a near deal breaker. Hopefully that gets fixed soon.

SJ,

Here's an updated list issues mentioned in this thread; things that have been altered in an apparent effort to bring Numbers for Mac into compatibility with iCloud Numbers and iOS numbers. A couple of items may just be bugs.

Function or feature or issue

• Alignment Guides, Static, Custom, are gone
• Applescript support has been reduced or eliminated
• Can’t open Numbers 08 documents
• Categories View gone
• Cell border custom line weight is sometimes lost when using Filter Rows
• Charted Dates don’t display properly when used as X-Axis values - hope this is just a bug
• Comments can’t be repositioned
• Comments can’t be resized
• Comments only display as Tool Tips now, can’t be static displays
• CSV file import seems to be limited to dragging a CSV file to the Numbers Dock Icon. Pasting to a table or the canvas is gone
• Custom Formats gone
• Find and Replace Results Pane is gone - was a great navigation tool
• Formula Bar is gone, replaced by a field at the bottom of the Numbers window in which the expression is displayed but can not be edited
• Formulas and Functions user guide PDF, easily searchable, is gone, replaced by web help page
• Graphics Inspector no longer treats a Table as an Object that can be formatted by the Graphics Inspector tools. Or, looking at it from the Table perspective, there is no way to add Shadow effect to a Table’s outline.
• Insert > Date and Time is gone
• Keyboard Shortcut reminders have been removed from Drop-Down Row and Column menus
• Numbers User Guide PDF is gone, is gone, replaced by web help page
• Page Headers and Footers are gone
• Page Margins can’t be adjusted
• Print Preview view not available while editing
• Reorganize Panel gone, no multi-level sort.
• Return key option to set the behavior while editing a cell is gone
• Show Autocompletion List in Table Columns is gone
• Sidebar list of Sheets is gone, along with the ability to drag objects from Sheet to Sheet and ability to leave the list of Tables and Charts exposed for navigation and reference.
• Sort Selected Rows is gone
• Sorting detector now stops cell references from following the sort movement. This loss a PLUS.
• Split Cells is gone
• Table Fills are not supported
• Toolbar Editor(add, delete, rearrange tool icons) is gone.

Please, give the person responsable for this *^&%$ a hard time

http://www.apple.com/feedback/numbers.html

Hi Roberto,

I don't like all this whining either, but I think people were looking forward to an UPgrade, whereas what we have with this version is a very serious DOWNgrade, putting STYLE way over SUBSTANCE.

I think a lot of us were looking forward to some of the useful tools of Excel being included (like <goal seek>, <cell protection>). Far from ADDING genuinely useful features, many seem to have been taken away.

As another commentator said, it appears to be a dumbed down iPhone/iPad version ported to a desktop. It should have been the other way round. Seriously, what proportion of users actually generate anything other than the most trivial spreadsheets on an iPhone/iPad?

Now all we can do is beautiful, but trivial, spreadsheets on a desktop.

Don

mombasadon wrote:

As another commentator said, it appears to be a dumbed down iPhone/iPad version ported to a desktop. It should have been the other way round. Seriously, what proportion of users actually generate anything other than the most trivial spreadsheets on an iPhone/iPad?

Now all we can do is beautiful, but trivial, spreadsheets on a desktop.

Hi Don,

There still seems to be lots of power under the hood (even some new functions that I would never know how to use). The guts of it seem essentially the same, maybe slightly faster. Some sophisticated stuff is still possible. It's just harder now because of the interface changes.

It sure would be tough to get much done on an iPhone. But on an iPad things are possible. Anyway, I suspect we'd all better get used to the heavy mobile influence (there's lots more growth there than on desktop or notebook) and hope they find ways to add back in crucial features in response to the outcry. Maybe a paid "pro" version, sort of like Aperture compared to iPhoto? Trouble is, the number of people like us doing "serious" spreadsheets may not be enough to make that worth the candle for them.

SG

Don,

The new Numbers, 3.0, has a beautiful user interface. The documents you can make now, not as beautiful as before. Too bad that the user interface became cleaner by drastically reducing the number of controls and options.

This new version might turn out to be handy, compared to higher functioning spreadsheet apps, by being simple. For me, so far, rather frustrating, not being able to do with this program what I could do last week.

Jerry

Wow I was saying that I thought with free software and upgrades Apple might be going after business market. Guess not. This program can't really do much data crunching. Guess I will have to look into buying Excel after all. Bummer. I was hoping to talk work into migrating over to Macs. But not now.

Jerry,

Very interesting comment to Don. I hadn't thought about the inability to make documents as beautiful as before. That may go to the heart of the matter. If you're Apple you're probably thinking, we no longer really need a product that helps people make nice documents to print out on dead trees. We need a product that can display information effectively on a high res screen on a device sold by ... Apple.

Hence, probably, the demphasis on pagination and all that. And the addition of things like interactive charts that presumably would be effective on a screen but not (obviously) on paper. Have you had a chance to try those? Are they any good?

SG

I'm taking a wait and see approach to the iWork environment with regard to Numbers.

I'm guessing that this new free-iWork-in-the-iCloud strategy wasn't conceived early enough to do it as well as they'd like to - but, they felt they had to get some cloud offering sooner, rather than later, to counter Microsoft and, perhaps, especially, Google/Android - just to know users they intend to go in that direction - they wouldn't know otherwise.

They're obviously hoping to draw in more users to the Apple ecosystem with this strategy, so the more they can give the users of Numbers/iWork, you'd think, the more they'd accomplish that.

Will they continue to beef up iWork for iCloud in the future? You've still got your Numbers 2.3 - it hasn't been taken away. And you've got cloud capabilities, maybe not as much as you'd like, for free.

We've got our list of missing features (in this discussion topic, somewhere), so let's see when and what they've got in store for the next iWork for iCloud. The next release of new features will speak, loud and clear, about how serious Apple is about iWork for iCloud, and Numbers.

SG,

I confess I haven't looked into the interactive chart feature. I was thinking about taking a week or so off from the discussions. Maybe I'll dig into the chart features and other new concepts in this share-o-sphere era.

J.

Yeah The Insert ->Date/Time is a big missing item. Very useful for my Invoices, which I have a auto-updating/manual-updating field to say when the invoice was created.