Office applications

I suspect it might be because Office and Google are both cross platform (for Windows, Mac and even Linux to a certain degree) - whereas Apple’s Office desktop applications are only available on Apple Devices.

The web version of the Apple apps on icloud.com are actually not that bad - probably comparable with the web versions of MS Office apps but not as good as the desktop Office Apps, but Apple have never made a feature and promoted the icloud.com portal and I’m not even sure if you can sign up to that without an Apple device? And even if you did, the basic free storage tier on it would make it difficult to use as your only Office service.

I’m not going to tell a $300Bn company what they’re doing wrong - but some recognition of the icloud portal and given it a bit of a refresh would be appreciated (such as putting other Apple services on there as well - like Apple Maps, TV, News+ etc) so those of us who use the services at home can also access them in work via a browser would be nice.

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I’ve been using Google’s office apps for a few months now and just find them so easy to use. I’ve had absolutely no issues and have been able to do everything that I’ve wanted. The syncing between my different devices has been seamless. With Microsoft Office, there are clearly more tools, but because there are so many, I found it quite hard to navigate at times and I found the apps didn’t work as well on my phone (and Teams doesn’t work well on my laptop either). I really have no reason to go back to using Microsoft’s apps.

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More Google Docs updates. It really has improved massively over the last 12-18 months.

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I’ve ended up going back to Microsoft’s apps. There was nothing wrong with Google’s apps and I could have easily continued to use them. There was just a very things that felt easier with Microsoft and I didn’t really realise how easy Microsoft made them until Google handled them in a slightly different way.

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Any examples, out of interest?

One extremely minor thing is the word count thing. I know you can get it to stay on the screen, but once you leave, it disappears again and you have to turn it back on. Obviously not a lot of effort, but when writing essays with a fixed word count, it is easy to always have the option there.

Footnotes also work better on Word. Docs just treats them a bit oddly and from memory, never counts the number of words they have which is annoying.

I also think the table of contents worked better with word but I really don’t use this often.

It’s basically a lot of very minor things that Word does a bit better. For most uses, Docs is absolutely fine but there are a few specific things that mean I just find Word easier.

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For me still the lack of multi-page view - editing long documents on an ultra-wide is PAINFUL compared to doing it in word.

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I started to give Apple Numbers a go, but am struggling to get used to it. Don’t think it will be long until I’m back to Excel or give Sheets a go.

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I’ve tried many and keep coming back to MS Office.
Too long in the tooth to change I expect. R-

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There is a bit of a learning curve from those used to Excel, but the only big advantage Numbers has for me is the ease of inputting data via a mobile device.

I have my budget spreadsheet on Google Sheets, but when away or out and about I input transactions to a Numbers document and copy/paste to the Google Sheet when I get back to a computer.

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It’s funny, because now I’m used to Numbers I find Excel limiting. (Putting aside that for the most complex spreadsheets, nothing beats Excel, but those aren’t my general needs.) The fact that I can’t have multiple different tables on a single tab, and the general lack of formatting/positioning options feels like being back in a DOS spreadsheet.

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Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?

The ‘Personal Finance’ templates when creating a new spreadsheet give an idea of this: you can have multiple tables each with different dimensions, headers, summary rows, etc. You can also have charts, graphics, and text boxes with fairly advanced layout.

It would take too long to anonymise some of my specific examples, but I use this extensively in my financial and tax spreadsheets. I know you can bodge multiple tables on one sheet in Excel, but it’s not a good idea because it quickly makes equations overly complex or error-prone. For instance, you can’t do =SUM(C) if your column C includes multiple different conceptual tables. Having multiple, distinct, tables all displayed on the same sheet that can be configured for their specific purpose and reference each other is a game changer.

Wikipedia also has a pretty good description of the different conceptual model Numbers uses:

Numbers works in a fashion somewhat different from traditional spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel or Lotus 1-2-3. In the traditional model, the table is the first-class citizen of the system, acting as both the primary interface for work and as the container for other types of media like charts or digital images. In effect, the spreadsheet and the table are the same. In contrast, Numbers uses a separate “canvas” as its basic container object and tables are among the many objects that can be placed within the canvas.

[…]

[In Excel] sheets often grow very complex with input data, intermediate values from formulas, and output areas, separated by blank areas. To manage this complexity, Excel allows one to hide data that is not of interest, often intermediate values. […]

In contrast, Numbers does not have an underlying spreadsheet in the traditional sense but uses multiple individual tables for this purpose. Tables are an X and Y collection of cells, like a sheet, but extend only to the limits of the data they hold. Each section of data or output from formulas can be combined into an existing table or placed into a new table. Tables can be collected by the user onto single or multiple canvases. Whereas a typical Excel sheet has data strewn across it, a Numbers canvas could build the same output through smaller individual tables encompassing the same data.

Numbers (spreadsheet) - Wikipedia

Edit: Looks like Lotus attempted to rethink how a spreadsheet could work in the 1990s. Kind of amazing that except for Numbers (which is less ‘ambitious’ in rethinking the underlying model than Lotus Improv was) there’s not been any mainstream attempt to rethink how a spreadsheet could work since VisiCalc created the spreadsheet in the 1970s.

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The issue I had with Numbers, and this is probably just my ignorance on how to use it and not a feature missing out of Numbers, is that I couldn’t work out how to get a sum of non-contiguous cells.

So, I’ve got a budget spreadsheet which lists all my monthly payments in it. At around the 3rd of the month, I would’ve paid 3/4 of my bills, but there’s still a few left to pay. So, in Excel and in Sheets, I can just go to the spreadsheet, hold ctrl and then highlight the cells and it’ll tell me the sum of those cells - even though they’re not all together (so I can then go and check if my Monzo bill pot still has enough or if I’ve miss calculated or a bill is higher than expected).

The only way I could get it to work was the relist all the items in the Numbers spreadsheet so that they were listed by date order of when they’re paid instead of by ‘Group’ of expenses (ie - all credit cards together, all household bills together, all car related stuff together, all entertainment/streaming stuff together).

What was I missing on how to do that?

The convention on the Mac for non-contiguous selection is to cmd-click. Try holding down the cmd key and clicking on the cells you want to sum. Numbers will update the selected total/max/count/etc values shown at the bottom of the window.

I’m general, Windows seems to use the ctrl modifier where the Mac uses cmd. So if there is something you’re used to with ctrl, try cmd instead.

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That is a useful solution. One of my main gripes with Numbers was the inability to reference cells from one s/sheet in a second one. Tabbed s/sheets in the same file was ok on a Mac but not external s/sheets. Lack of planning on my part a little but it is a nice Excel feature. Was there a way round that @jzw95? R-

=SUM(Table1[[#All],[Spent]])

image

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@RogerB, referencing cells in other files isn’t possible in Numbers unfortunately (and somewhat strangely, as AppleWorks could do this and otherwise had much more basic spreadsheet functionality). But as I said in my original comment, for some more complex spreadsheets, Excel has features that nothing else matches, for better or worse.

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