Wed, 21 May 2008 Excel 2008 vs. Number ’08

To find out how Apple’s Numbers ’08 and Microsoft Excel 2008 compare, we used both programs to create the same sales-tracking spreadsheet.

Data entry, formulas, formatting We started by creating a single worksheet, with a fictional company’s product sales by month across the top and a row for each of six sales representatives. We added cells at the bottom and to the right, where we calculated totals and averages for each month and each salesperson.

Entering basic data in both programs is quite simple. Excel, however, made the task particularly easy. It warns you when you acciden­tally try to drag one cell to another already full cell; Numbers simply overwrote the destination without warning. Excel also offers nine separate rules for flagging potential errors; Numbers offers only one.

When copying one cell to another, Excel highlights the copied cell, so you can easily see what you’ve copied. Numbers doesn’t, leading to some pasting errors. In addition, we found the size of the text and icons in Numbers’ toolbar to be quite small, even on a large monitor. Excel’s toolbar was much easier on the vision.

Excel (top) and Numbers (bottom) each created decent charts easily, but Excel was smarter about it

Excel is better at helping you enter formulas. We selected the empty cell below the numbers we wanted to sum, and clicked on the Sum button in the toolbar. Excel figured out the top and bottom of the range. Numbers included extraneous rows when we tried to do the same thing.

That said, Numbers has a few helpful data-entry tricks of its own – if you select an already entered Sum formula in Numbers, the program highlights the range that formula sums; Excel does this only if you double-click on the cell to edit it. Numbers also makes it easy to see what’s being summed, without you having to click the mouse.

We found that basic formatting is easier in Excel. For example, a keyboard shortcut (C-alt-arrow keys) makes it a breeze to add single-line borders to any cell. Excel also provides a more extensive choice of cell border types than Numbers does.

Numbers’ default worksheet size (on the Blank template) is small; if you want more than 13 rows or 45 columns, you need to drag a corner to make the sheet bigger. Excel, on the other hand, opens a massive work area, ready for even the largest of worksheets.

Verdict: Overall, we found that Excel made the process of creating the simple worksheet easier and more enjoyable than Numbers did.

Charts, advanced formulas For the intermediate spreadsheet, we added two more products to our fic­tional company’s product line and then created a summary spreadsheet, which consolidated sales for all three products for all representatives by month. From that data, we created a stacked bar chart. Finally, we added some formulas to grab the names of the highest-producing month and salesperson, as well as a formula to display the name of the top-selling product.

Creating extra worksheets was simple in both programs, as was creating the consolidated worksheet with links to the others. The hardest part was adjusting to Numbers’ use of multiple tables on one page – it’s a very different approach to Excel’s.

Creating charts is easy, too: in both programs, creating a basic chart was a matter of highlighting the range you want to graph and clicking on a couple of buttons. Of the two, we found Excel’s raw chart to be more usable. First, the legend is attached to the chart, so they move as one object; in Numbers, the legend is a separate object, and we often forgot to move it when we moved the chart. Second, Excel scaled the y-axis more intelligently; Numbers tried to use noninteger values – Excel didn’t.

Numbers, on the other hand, includes a default chart title, and makes it easier to see the data associ­ated with the chart when you select it – the relevant range is highlighted in colours that match those used for the data points in the chart.

To pull the month name and salesperson’s name for the highest-production month, we had to build formulas that used the OFFSET(), MATCH() and MAX() functions. Excel is better at helping you enter complex formulas – a tooltip shows up below the cell, listing each function’s variables. In Numbers, no tooltips appear; we could have used the Insert Function feature, but this puts the descriptions of variables in the cell, and we would have had to manually overwrite them as we entered a formula.

It’s easy to highlight the highest sales month for any representative, using calculations in Excel’s conditional-formatting rules. You can’t do this with Numbers

More frustrating, however, is the inability to use the keyboard when entering formulas in Numbers. In Excel, you can use an arrow key and the shift key to rap­idly select ranges while entering a formula. In Numbers, you have to use the mouse, which really slows down the process.

Numbers handles the Undo command in a confusing manner. If you change a cell’s value and then pressed C-Z, the cell would go blank. you have to press C-Z again to return to the original value. Before we figured this out, we wound up with blank cells in our worksheet on a few occasions.

Verdict: Excel is much better for adding charts and formulas – the ability to use the keyboard, in particular, saves much time in entering complex formula.

Forms, conditional formatting Using a simple design and each program’s tools for accepting user input, we created a sheet that would allow for easy entry of product and sales representatives’ names, along with the starting month for the sales report. The values on this input page are transferred to the tracking worksheet via formulas. To define the starting month, we created a pop-up menu containing Jan, Feb and so forth, so that users wouldn’t make data entry errors.

Translating this input into a date form that could be used to calculate the column headers required a bit of thinking in both Numbers and Excel. That’s because we wanted the pop-up menu to display the month names, but we needed to enter an actual date value into the sheet, based on the user’s response to that pop-up.

In Excel, we used a simple DATE() function with the returned value as the month number. In Numbers, though, we had to add a lookup table and use the VLOOKUP() function to convert the month name into a number usable in the DATE() formula.

We also thought about making it possible for an inexperienced user to input individual sales results in this sheet: a user would pick a sales representative’s name, the month and the product line from a series of pop-up menus, and then enter the sales result for that month; the input sheet would copy that figure to the proper spot on the supporting worksheet.

In Excel 2004, we could have done all of this relatively easily with a macro. Neither Excel 2008 nor Numbers have macro support. Excel 2008 does have AppleScript support, but AppleScripts cannot be assigned to buttons on a worksheet, as macros could in Excel 2004; instead, they must be run from the Scripts menu. Addition­ally, building this functionality in AppleScript requires much more programming than Excel 2004’s macro tools – you can’t record an AppleScript as you could a macro. Numbers, lacking both macros and AppleScript support, doesn’t seem to have any way of creating such a function.

Given these problems in both programs, we didn’t pursue this avenue any further. It’s disappointing that two much newer programs have more difficulty with this relatively simple task than Excel 2004 does.

Next, we wanted to highlight the absolute best sales month for the combined product line. In Excel, we could do this with a conditional format set up to check if a given cell in the range is equal to the maximum value within that range.

The end result makes it easy to spot the top month and representative – and if there’s a tie, Excel will highlight all top results. In Numbers, though, conditional formats can’t contain calculations, so it was impossible to achieve the same result. A formula in a separate cell sort of worked, but it couldn’t show more than one value in the event of a tie.

Finally, we did a fair amount of work tweaking the look of the spreadsheet, to get it ready to present to the boss. Numbers has the edge thanks to its abilities with gradients, transparency and cell backgrounds, though.

Verdict: Excel 2008 is much better than its predecessor, and gets the overall win due to its ability to create custom number and date formats – something you can’t do in Numbers.

The final word In general, we found it much simpler to work with Excel in all phases of our sample project. Although Numbers has some stunning templates, its shortcomings make it more difficult to use when you leave template land. Those failings include its inability to simply show a formula’s variables as you enter it and its lack of keyboard support in selecting ranges when you’re entering formulas. You can create a prettier spreadsheet in Numbers, but Excel offers more formulas, features and tools to help with actually building the spreadsheet.

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