I’ve been waiting for Numbers ever since it was rumored to be released in last years iWork (that never shipped). The reason: I’ve been tied to two options, the first is Google Spreadsheets for personal use and occasionally work when we need to collaborate on data and the other is excel. Numbers will never replace Google Spreadsheets for the collaboration side and it’s just too easy to use GS since I’m using Google Apps for my personal use. For work I primarily manage very large CSV files and I’ve been forced to use excel for these documents.

The problems with excel are long and would just waste space so I wont list them here but the top failings; it’s extremely slow running through rosetta on large sheets and it’s extremely buggy with large spreadsheets (e.g. scrolling). A couple days ago Apple announced numbers in their press conference and I downloaded the trial for iWork ‘08. As soon as I started it up I was impressed.

Similar to Keynote and Pages it’s very simple and robust but while you’re impressed with the ease and functionality in the first few minutes the learning curve starts soon after. The learning curve for the MS Office users is rather annoying. Not annoying that Apple designed it this way but annoying that you’re habits of clunky office aren’t going to work with the iWork apps, especially Numbers. Even MS has noticed the UI of Office pre-’07 is obnoxious and that’s why they created the ribbon, something that completely resolves the UI issues of the old Office but is very hard to get used to if you’re a veteran at Office.

On to Numbers. The application is wonderful, I could see it helping out every excel lite user out there. Apple calls it a “flexible canvas” and it’s wonderful, similar to Pages it allows for you to move anything anywhere without being tied to a grid or a table. Charts, Images and Graphs are going to make Numbers standout. Like Keynote you know whether you’re looking at a keynote presentation or a powerpoint well now you’ll know whether the spreadsheet was create in Numbers or Excel. And with it supporting Open XML it wont matter whether you send it for another user to open it in excel or create a PDF with it’s new “Interactive Print View”.

Apple has really given the common excel hater what they want in Numbers because it’s completely “revolutionized” remixed how spreadsheets are done. The shift away from what we expect form a spreadsheet program is refreshing and is going to help out a lot of people that don’t power use excel now.

For the power users of excel, don’t get too excited. It’s worth checking out since the purposes you use excel could be responsive in Numbers but some of my major functionalities are missing (for now). That one major option is “Auto Filter”. A missing Auto Filter option is extremely surprising to me since the ease of use is what Apple is going for and is extremely noticeable because the filtering is the same filtering in mail or any other core OS X app, very basic or too basic for me in a spreadsheet app.

For now I’m going to keep both and see what I can do with Numbers that I can’t in excel and hopefully it wont be the vice-versa.