Numbers—the spreadsheet app in Apple's iWork suite—is both the easiest to use of all advanced spreadsheet apps and the only one that breaks the standard mold in a usefully innovative way. It's pretty good (though not perfect) at interacting with Excel, too, so you don't have to worry about being cut off from the rest of the world, spreadsheet-wise if you choose Apple's software.

What's the big innovation, you ask? In all other spreadsheet apps, a worksheet page contains a single grid pattern that underlies the entire page. You can insert graphics on top of the grid, but all the data on the page has to fit into the horizontal and vertical cells created by the grid. Numbers, in contrast, gives you a worksheet that works like a whiteboard—you can place tables, graphics, charts, text, or multimedia anywhere on the worksheet and move them around freely. If you want your tables, charts, and text boxes to line up neatly, Numbers (like the rest of the iWork suite) displays guidelines when two or more elements are nearly aligned, and you can snap an element into alignment by dropping it on a guideline.

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Numbers can't perform the advanced data-management feats that make Excel essential for high-end financial and scientific work, but Numbers lets you perform simpler tasks far more easily. For example, sometimes you might want to transpose a table's rows into columns and its columns into rows. Excel expects you to remember that you do this by first copying the table, then pasting it over itself while choosing the Transpose option from the Paste menu.

Far more helpfully, Numbers has a menu item, "Transpose Rows and Columns." Everywhere in its interface, Numbers makes it easy to find data that Excel displays in ways that make it hard to pick it out from the background. One of many possible examples is the customizable status bar, available in both apps, that displays the sum, count, average, and other information about selected cells. Excel shows a low-tech row of numbers and labels that requires close attention to decipher, while Numbers puts a rounded box around each item so that you can pick it out at a glance.

The Apple Approach
As in Pages and Keynote, Numbers rethinks the Microsoft Office model for spreadsheets by letting you treat almost everything in a worksheet as a graphic element that you manipulate to get results. You can build a formula in the traditional Excel way by choosing functions from a menu, or by typing the first few letters and selecting from a menu of autocomplete suggestions, and then inserting each function until you have the formula you need.

But Numbers' formula bar displays operators and cell references as color-coded objects that can easily be rearranged, and so the whole process of building or debugging a formula is easier to understand at a glance—and not like the text-style formulas in Excel that often require attentive parsing before you understand them. As in Excel, you can build simple formulas by clicking an option like Count or Average in a dropdown and then selecting some cells, but Numbers provides visual feedback that's far more clear than Excel's.

Formatting
Also as in Pages and Keynote, Numbers lets you manage formatting from an inspector pane at the right of the editing window. (The inspector pane turns into a function menu when you're building a formula.) The controls on the inspector pane change when you move the cursor among different elements on a worksheet, and you can apply table and graphic styles by selecting them from a dropdown menu. Optionally, you can assign each of the F1 through F8 keys to a specific style and apply a style by pressing a key.

To redefine a style, simply change the formatting of a cell or other element that uses that style, and choose "Redefine from Selection" from the style menu. This makes it easier to figure out exactly how you want a style to look inside your worksheet before you redefine it—unlike Excel, where you redefine a style from the style menu, then see how it looks, then redefine it again until you get what you want.