iWork '08: Numbers Rocks!

I've been trying iWork '08. I never really bothered too much with previous versions, because

1. I was locked into a world in which I pretty much had to use Microsoft Office for reasonably realiable interchange of documents with colleagues (though reasonably is the operative word here; it was our frequent experience that documents were not really interchangeable between different versions of Office even on PCs, were rarely interchangeable between Macs and PCs if they included graphics (or, of course, any fonts other than Arial and Times) and were not even always interchanged correctly between colleagues using ostensibly the same version of Office on Windows machines!)
2. the most praised part of iWork was Keynote, and many conference organizers like speakers to provide slides for use on a resident PC-PowerPoint combo; the last thing you want is to turn up and find that your slides aren't as prepared.

However, with iWork '08 came not only enhancements to Keynote and Pages, but a new spreadsheet (Numbers) supporting a fundamentally new paradigm—multiple grids on a single sheet. This was simply too interesting, especially now that I've left my old company and have more freedom to choose the best tools rather than the most widely used. I had to try it.

I dived straight into Numbers and this single innovation of allowing different grids on a single sheet has immediately freed me from a world of pain. With (Microsoft) Office, for simple layouts I would just use Excel, making frequent use of merged cells to allow different alignments down the page, but this was always unsatisfactory. For anything complex, I would always be reduced to doing they layout in Word (never trivial, since Word always thinks it knows what I want better than I do), pasting in individual tables tortuously with 'Paste Picture (Enhanced Metafile)', as the only way of getting the picture to look anything like it did in Excel. (In passing, what is 'Paste Picture (Windows Metafile)' good for? It seems to translate as 'Paste in such a way that it will look hideous in your document'.)

For my initial uses, Numbers has been marvellous. I reproduced an invoice that I had previously done in Excel in a fraction of the time, managing in the process to achieve exactly the layout I had wanted but had only been able to approximate in Excel. Being an invoice, this exercised only fairly basic functionality (simple calculations, simple formatting, a graphical template, alignment, page footer), so I have no idea how Numbers will perform when heavier number-crunching is required. But so far, it has been a joy. It did take me a couple of minutes to figure out how to get rid of the (very faint grey) gridlines that Numbers seems to add when you import an Excel spreadsheet, but after that it has been plain sailing.

What's remarkable about this, to my mind, is that I rate Excel as head and shoulders above the other components of Microsoft Office. In fact, Excel is by far the best Microsoft product I've ever used. By and large, it works and stays out of the way once you turn off its most annoying features. I rate PowerPoint next best of the office bunch, vastly improved over the years. Although I think it's hard to use, the fact is that if you spend enough time with it, you can usually get PowerPoint to do what you want (though I've never found a way of stopping it capitalizing first words of bullet lists other than manually correcting its corrections). Like Word, it is sensationally inept at nested lists, and its handling of colour schemes is enough to test a pacifist's commitment to non-violence, but it gets the job done. Only Word and Outlook truly show Microsoft at its idiotic, interfering, clueless worst.

I shall be most interested over the coming weeks to see how I get on trying out Numbers, Keynote and Pages in anger. I'm sure there will be problems and limitations, some infuriating, but so far, after brief exposure to each, things are looking amazingly good.