Thursday, August 09, 2007
Numbers completes the package
I believe the biggest announcement by Apple is not the updates to the iMacs. Although they were pretty cool. The big one in my mind is the completion of an Office package which is suppposably compatible with MS Office. Numbers completes the package. It looks very much like Appleworks where you can have sections of spreadsheets intermixed with graphics instead of having one massive grid locking you in. You can have that if you want but being able to peal off a grid and use it somewhere else on the page adds versatility. I always liked that feature of Appleworks. Except Appleworks was never updated much from its original design. Now who needs any MS product running on your Mac?
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It is incredibly exciting - the leap to being MS free! Actually, I have used EXCEL for my grade calculations for years. I'm excited to convert all of those sheets over to Numbers. I read a great article on Numbers - check it out:
Numbers First Look
It looks like Numbers is a prettier version of Excel good for basic spreadsheets but missing some of the major features of Excel. This could just exist as a warning to MS to keep Excel on the Mac up to date. The lack of VB support is a big missing piece. It would be difficult to impleament on the mac since pretty much all of Windows is based on VB. It is almost the operating system. Apple probably does not want to go into this market of spreadsheets by investing too much money in a break even business, if that. This is like the Zune trying to take over the iPod market. It does pretty much the same thing but is missing key features. The spreadsheet market is mature. There is not much new to add to the software. If Apple wanted to make a spreadsheet program as good or better than Excel it could. Look at how good iMovie, and Garageband is. And this is with much more complex data than just applying math formulas on a set of numbers. Try calculating a gradual transition movie effect from one clip to another in real time, while updating the display while you are doing the calc. Apples R&D money is better spent on updates to the iPhone and iMac. Nuff said.
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