Apple’s Numbers Gets Spreadsheet Interaction Right

Yesterday, during aluminum iMacs, a new low profile aluminum keyboard, and a number of updates to their popular iLife and iWork suites.

I’ve yet to get my hands on one of the keyboards. The local Apple store did receive the new iMacs, in fact they’re putting them out tonight, but they didn’t have any of the keyboards to sell yet. So, I’ll have to wait.

Apple has done a pretty good job lately at looking at how people are using their products. And the results show up in their design decisions.

Take photos for instance. We all have photos we take at events, be it a party, gathering, or casual get together. Now you can tag photos by event. Looking for Birthday photos? No problem. While you could have done this with albums in the past, now you don’t have to have an album for this. They’ve made it easier. Fewer things to clutter your photo album list and the interface.

One of the advents of going digital is that you can take all the photos you want for cheap - there’s no film to process. The downside is that you get a lot of crap photos you have to delete and some you’re not sure if you want to keep them, or delete them. Well, they’ve made that easier too. Delete the ones you don’t want to keep. Save the ones you really want. And hide those B photos - it’s okay, you can recall them anytime you want.

Pages now has two modes - word processing and page layout. Again, making it easier to do what you want without having to sort through all the extra stuff. And Pages finally has the ability to track changes - something that would have prevented me from being able to use it for my book on prototyping.

Keynote has a number of new transitions and other fun stuff. But the killer app for me has finally arrived and it’s called Numbers. Finally, someone has designed a spreadsheet application properly.

Numbers does the typical Excel stuff, like spreadsheets, calculations, and charts. It also lets you put multiple sheets on one screen and the formatting of each sheet is independent of each other. But the killer part of numbers… formulas in real english. You want to total a column of expenses, the formula is =SUM Expenses. Yup, not =SUM (D2:D9) or something cryptic, just plain old english. Oh, and it maintains a short list of the most common formula commands at the left and you can simply drag and drop them into your spreadsheet.

Oh, and one more thing - interactive printing. Unlike Excel, you can do a print preview, then scale in real time or more items from one printed page to another.