Numbers 4+

With Numbers, Apple has freed us from the tyranny of "fixed grid" spreadsheets. I can easily move individual tables and charts to make side-by-side comparisons much easier and even overlap tables in order to compare specific colusmns in two or more different tables. Just like you would with paper. Canvas concept. Feels much more natural, like working with yesteryear's paper-based (in a very good way). Canvas concept -- not just traditional spreadsheet tables, but also images, videos, documents, pretty much anything can be added to the Numbers canvas. Clean, unbloated interface. HOWEVER, there is a huge fatal flaw (for me) -- Numbers does not have a feature to group/collapse/expand rows and columns (Excel: Data > Group and Outline, Google Sheets: Data > Group). I use spreadsheets for revenue and cost data, with columns representing multiple years, further broken out by month. A way to group the months of each year is an absolute necessity for me, to enable easy switching between Year-views and Month-views. There is a Group feature for rows (Organize > Create Group for Rows), but its intended usage is for Pivot Table functionality, and not for simple collapsing and expanding. Fix this flaw, and Numbers gets 4, even 5, stars.

I use numbers every day to take inventory in a small shop with a lot of products in several categories. I can filter by category, and sort by brand which i love. my issue is this kind of organizing only makes visual changes to my table, but all of my irrelelvant data is still in the file, and the sorting is reverted if i close and reopen the file. i can save my sort preferences as a template, but then if i share the file to someone else, it's just a huge mess again. i have no way to export a sorted, filtered table to share with fellow employees, except for a clumsy copy and paste into a new file. I'd like a direct, smooth and clean option to create a new table from Visible or from selection, export or save a table file based on whats visible or selected. Something like that, so i can take a mess of data and create new meaningful tables from it in a way that makes sense.

After spending considerable money on several budgeting apps which turned out to be far too complicated for me to use and which didn’t really fit into my daily work habits, I decided to go into do-it-yourself mode. What I needed was an easy-to-use basic budget where I could get a general overview of my income and expenses as well as keep more detailed records of my expenditures and also make balance sheets for my daily expenses and bank and credit card accounts. Numbers came to the rescue with one of their templates called “Simple Budget"! It took a little bit of doing, as I am no genius and certainly no expert when it comes to accounting and using spreadsheets, but Numbers made it easy for me to organize the information I needed and to make the calculations required as well as transfer information from one sheet to another to keep information consistent over a number of spreadsheets. I was also able to make beautiful pie charts of my expenses as well as color-code my columns and headers. Thank you! Numbers is a beautiful application I now couldn’t live without.