Apple has finally released what a lot of Apple fans, and speculators have been waiting for. With the release of iWork ’08 Apple has added a spreadsheet.
The application shifts how you might think of spreadsheets. With numbers a spreadsheet is so much more. For example.
You are not restricted to the normal grid structure of a typical spreadsheet. The focus is much more on presentation and design. You can move or resize a particular table and position it where you would like without having an affect on surrounding tables.
Separate sheets take on a more important role, they are more accessible and useful in Numbers because of the way Apple has separated the tables and charts within the sheets list. Checking out a few of the templates in the trial will help illustrate this. The image on the left is the home improvement template. Each option in the list provides a different view of the data.
Image, text, and other media are very easy to use in Numbers. They call it “a flexible media-rich canvas.” And that’s what it is. This software makes presentation easy.
I don’t think I’m going to buy it however. The reason is most of my work is done on the web, and numbers for some ridiculous reason does not support HTML exporting. Apparently it does export to iWeb ’08, I’ve never been able to work well with iWeb. I’ll have to check it out more perhaps. It seems to me that Apple would have made it easier to export to HTML.
I’ll be sticking with NeoOffice, or perhaps I’ll give Office:Mac ’08 a try.
