One of the things Apple released yesterday was Numbers, the new spreadsheet portion of iWork. There is a 30 day free trial, so of course I downloaded it. It is supposed to be able to read and write Excel files. So I gave it a workout importing the big huge (19MB) spreadsheet where I keep tons of personal data and graphs. It spent quite a few minutes importing and chugging and then finally came up. But it said there were warnings and asked if I wanted to see them. Of course I said yes. The first three “warnings” (out of a few dozen) were:
- Sorting criteria were removed.
- Date and time values can’t be used in charts. Charts containing dates and times were removed.
- Scatter plot charts with data points connected by lines were converted to ones without connecting lines.
Well… lets just say that those last two items there cover pretty much every chart I have. Almost everything I have is time series data using date/time stamps as the X axis in a scatter plot with some other variable on the Y. Of the handful that are not, they are scatter plots with lines connecting the points.
So, while I was hopeful that I might be able to say goodbye to Microsoft Office and Excel on my Mac, that will definitely not be the case, and I’m sure I’ll be getting Office 2008 for the Mac when it comes out next year. (Although if it is anything like Office 2007 for Windows, I’ll probably keep the old versions around too, because Office 2007 is still driving me batty.)
Oh well. I may still give the new version of Pages a try though.
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