Nicholas Lindley

Numbers, part of Apple's iWork, is a spreadsheet program similar to Microsoft's Excel. I said once I had a chance to use it I'd let you know what I think, so here's what I think:

Love it. In the platonic way.

Now, I know it doesn't have some of the fancy features like the solver, but for what I (and most others) do, it's great. It has all of the functions you would expect from a spreadsheet application, as well as some others. There are some nice themes that allow you to easily create a nice looking table, tables are easier to manipulate, and sheets can contain more than one table. I've attached an image so you can see what I mean by more than one table per sheet.

The organization I also find easier to use with the hierarchal structure in the left pane—much better than scrolling through a bunch of tabs at the bottom of the page. And like one can expect from Apple products, the interface is clean and uncluttered, leaving the most useful commonly used features in the toolbars and keeping the rest in the menus.

If you haven't seriously looked into Macs this millennium, they're not what they used to be. I used to be one of the biggest Windows fanboys making the typical market-share and application-support arguments. Once I started college I started looking at Linux, over time grew to like that, got a student job as a sys admin for Purdue's research computing center, and completely moved away from Windows in the summer of 2004. In the summer of 2005 I bought my first Mac because it could fulfill the needs of a sys admin, and it still ran the commercial software I wanted as a new music major. Anyway, for most people's uses, I have found that the Mac provides the best user experience, has more programs that "just work," and is more stable. And I haven't even mentioned iLife... :) However, before you make the price-per-performance argument, compare the price to a PC that is of as high of quality with software as good. You'll find the prices are more similar than you first thought, and that the applications don't have comparable replacements in Windows.

Anyway, enough of that rant. And just so you know, I still really like Linux. Debian's package management is pretty slick, and you should see what can be done with Compiz. If you'd ever like a demo, just ask.

I think for my next blog post I'm going to do something on GnuPG. I would really like to see more of my peers starting to use it.