Table Functions in Pages

Question

Level 2

349 points

Table Functions in Pages

I was doing some physics homework that required to do the same calculations with dozens of sets of data. Since doing this by had would take forever, I thought to just create a table and copy&paste the functions so all I would have to do was enter the data. To my horror, I can only seem to find a few basics functions: absolute value, interpret, product, sign, sum, average, etc. - just the basic accounting stuff. There is no sine, cosine, tanget, or other trigonometric function that I depsperately needed. I found this very surprising since the calculator application in Mac OSX has all of these functions.

Are these to be found elsewhere? I had to go find a friend with a copy of Excel and deal with that program's annoying UI. With Apple's gearing toward the science community, I'm surprised that this isn't a feature.

1.67Ghz - 17 PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.8) 2GB SD-RAMM

Posted on Feb 7, 2007 6:03 PM

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Answer 1

Tulse

Level 5

5,812 points

Feb 7, 2007 7:55 PM in response to Dan Bargen

iWork currently doesn't have much in the way of spreadsheet functionality. That said, I don't know many other $40 word processors that do trig functions in their tables.

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Answer 2

IanB

Level 4

1,374 points

Feb 8, 2007 12:45 AM in response to Dan Bargen

Hello Dan

You could try the spreadsheet function of NeoOffice. It's free and has a lot of the trigonometric functions you refer to. You should be able to paste the value content of the spreadsheet cells to a table in Pages. If you have to plot any of the data, OS X's Grapher application is also excellent. It will take data sets as well as raw tables of data to interpolate a curve. You can paste the graphics from there to Pages too.

Good luck.

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Answer 3

billious

Level 1

0 points

Feb 8, 2007 2:57 AM in response to IanB

You might also try Google Docs and Spreadsheets, which has the advantage that you can work on the document wherever you can access the web. The list of functions implemented in a spreadsheet can be found here :

http://docs.google.com/support/spreadsheets/bin/static.py?page=functionlist_en.h tml

Bill

iMac flat panel G4 Mac OS X (10.4.3) and Risc OS too

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Answer 4

Brie Fly

Level 5

7,925 points

Feb 8, 2007 7:59 PM in response to Dan Bargen

If you're talking about single-equation calculations (as opposed to spreadsheet block calculations), launch Grapher (found in your Applications folder) to perform your calculations.

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Answer 5

Feb 10, 2007 1:07 AM in response to Tulse

That said, I don't know
many other $40 word processors that do trig functions
in their tables.

To me it is a mystery that Pages does not have it. Not only has Appleworks had it for more than twenty years, there are plenty of freeware applications that have it. And on each of our harddisks, the function is present over and over again: in bc, in java, in perl, in Grapher, in Calculator.

And Pages' formulas support a few dozen other functions already. It would probably have cost them nothing to add trigonometry.

If you have a word processor without any support for formulas at all, I can understand it. But supporting things like ISERROR but not sine is very strange.

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Answer 6

Dan Bargen Author

Level 2

349 points

Feb 12, 2007 6:32 PM in response to SermoDaturCunctis

I guess I can reinstall my old copy of Appleworks or use the grapher. It would be worth the space to have this ability on occasion. Hopefully we'll see these features in the next iWork update. Rumor says as much, if there's not a separate spreadsheet application as well.

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