Moving from Office at home to Numbers 4.3

thomas,

Numbers has never been able to refer to cells in other documents. You can always provide feedback to Apple using the Numbers menu item "Numbers > Provide Numbers Feedback". Even if it could, I would advise against using such a feature.

you should be able to freeze header columns by setting a column as a header using the Table formatter:

Header columns (and rows) will be repeated only when you print.

Yes, it's sounds as if Numbers is a good choice to handle the tasks you describe. You'll probably find it a pleasant and efficient environment as long as you don't try to make it "just like Excel" and instead try to take advantage of the strengths of its table-centric design.

If you currently have your work scattered in different Excel documents try opening them all in Numbers and then moving the sheets into one document. The best way I've found to move a sheet is to choose 'Cut Sheet' or 'Copy Sheet' from the dropdown by the 'tab' at the top...

... then click the destination document, choose the same dropdown in any existing sheet, and choose 'Paste Sheet'.

Once you've got all the sheets in the same document you'll find that cross-referencing between sheets and tables works well. Instead of typing addresses into a formula, though, you'll probably want to just click the cell or select the range you're trying to add and let Numbers do the work of inserting the correct reference.

You'll probably want to remove blank cells and columns in individual tables as they aren't needed as they often are in Excel to demarcate different areas of your work. Where you had everything all in a big expanse of cells in Excel, you'll probably want to organize things in multiple tables in Numbers, similar to what you see in the templates.

SG

Hi Thomas (just guessing your name 😉),

SG wrote:

You'll probably want to remove blank cells and columns in individual tables as they aren't needed as they often are in Excel to demarcate different areas of your work. Where you had everything all in a big expanse of cells in Excel, you'll probably want to organize things in multiple tables in Numbers, similar to what you see in the templates.

That was the big Ahaa! for me when i swapped from Excel to Numbers. The charm of Numbers is the ability to create several small tables of data on each Sheet. Each table has a purpose; blank cells just get in the way of your aim.

Here is my default custom Template that I see when I launch Numbers or ask for a new document (command n)

These are my settings in Numbers > Preferences > General

It is easy to expand that default table with extra data. Indeed, much easier than shrinking a large "ocean" of cells with small "islands" of data as in Excel. (Thanks to Barry for that analogy).

Regards,

Ian.

I am only saying that referring to a cell in another document is not supported by Numbers and that, even if it were available, I would avoid it. Referring to cells in different sheets of the same document is, in my opinion, fine.

In Numbers:

a file, which is stored on your hard drive, contains a document

a document contains one, or more, sheets

a sheet contains one, or more, tables, shapes, text boxes, images

a table contains one, or more, cells

a cell contains any one of:

- number

- date/time value

- duration

- text

HI Thomas,

Office for Mac is still available as a one-time purchase with a Home and Student licence.

It's restricted to non-commercial use, and does not include the upgrades that are part of the subscription route.

Price when we purchased a few months ago was $130 (Canadian).

MS hasn't included Access in the Office for Mac package, nor are any of the features depending on VBA available.

Regards,

Barry

Hi,

I use both Numbers and MS Office a lot. I've found the subscription a great deal. The whole suite including Outlook (and Access and Publisher if you have a PC two) on up to 5 devices, keep up-to-date frequently, for $80 year, or $8/mo. Or, for one user, $60/year or $6/mo.

The one-time purchase for one machine is $290, or $120 without Outlook.

I'm pretty sure VBA is available in all versions if you need that.

But, even with MS Office, I try to avoid references to separate documents. They always seem to get "broken" when I move files around.

In Numbers, there is even less reason to have references between documents. That's because in Numbers it's very convenient (much more convenient than in Excel) to have multiple tables on one sheet. Having the ability to have multiple tables on one sheet, and multiple sheets all in the same document gives plenty of flexibility for even complex projects. Have a look at the templates at File > New in the menu to see good examples of document design in Numbers (different from what you might do in Excel).

The one thing you will find, though, is that Numbers is not ideal for working with big data sets. It gets sluggish. If you have to work with lots of data, best stick with Excel.

SG