Opening xlsx file in Numbers - can I easily find what's changed?

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Level 3

777 points

Opening xlsx file in Numbers - can I easily find what's changed?

This must have been asked before, but I can't find solutions.

I'm considering using Numbers rather than Excel. When I open an xlsx file in Numbers, is there an easy way to see what's changed? It warns me that formulas which can't be calculated will be converted to numbers based on most recent value - but I'd like to see which exact cells those are.

Some of the spreadsheets I'm dealing with are pretty big, so it'd be nice to get a quick summary of what's "broken". For example, I know Numbers won't link to other files/documents, and that's a feature I've used a lot - but I'd like to at least see highlighting of the affected cells.

This page of compatibility is quite useful but, well, I set up some of these spreadsheets an awfully long time ago and to be honest I'm no longer even sure which formulas I used.

(Context: I'm still using Office 2008 on a 2009 iMac running Sierra. I'll be upgrading to High Sierra fairly soon, whether on this system or a new computer; Excel is the only MS Office software I still use, and I doubt I qualify as power user, so I'm trying to figure out if I can/should start using Numbers, or Google Docs, or whatever the LibreOffice Excel equivalent is. I do sometimes use spreadsheets on a Windows computer at work, but I don't need to share the files with anyone.)

Thanks!

iMac, macOS Sierra (10.12), Late 2009 iMac

Posted on Jan 6, 2018 5:42 PM

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SGIII

Level 8

35,324 points

Jan 6, 2018 7:24 PM in response to Lost in Asia

The best way to approach this, I think, is to just give it a try. I don't think there is a way to automatically spot where the translation failed. If your documents are so big and complicated that you don't know what's in there maybe this is an opportunity for housekeeping.🙂

Numbers can open .xlsx documents but, as you say, not everything translates well from Excel to Numbers. Most Numbers formulas work the same in Numbers as in Excel. But Excel has some formulas (notably so-called "array" formulas) that Numbers doesn't support. And Numbers has some formulas (notably formulas related to "duration") that Excel doesn't have. The two apps store and treat date-time somewhat differently.

Also bear in mind that Numbers is table-centric, making it easy to have more than one table on a sheet. (Excel has tables too, but they arrived late in its long life and aren't as easy to use as Numbers tables.) So you'll probably want to adapt some of your Excel documents to take advantage of the design strengths of Numbers. See the built-in templates at File > New for good examples of the Numbers approach.

If you have large datasets you will be happier with Excel, as Numbers gets sluggish after a few thousand rows.

Both Excel and Numbers are excellent apps on the Mac. Maybe, like me, you'll want to use both.

SG

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