iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Chapter 19. Organizing Tables in Numbers

Now that you can spin your way across tables faster than a can-can dancer, you’ve got all the know-how you need to fill up your grids with lots of juicy data. But all that info is only useful if you can pluck it back out again, and that’s where a little organization goes a long way. Once you’ve got your data loaded into a table, it’s time to go to work to massage it into shape—structuring it, sorting it, searching it, filtering it. This chapter shows you all the ways that Numbers can help you tidy your tables and find the right info at the right time.

This organizational effort is about more than shuffling data, though: A pristine table also looks clean, and this chapter also shows you how to make your data more accessible (and your tables prettier) with the judicious application of borders and background fills. Once you’ve transformed your gray numbers into shapely figures, Numbers makes it easy to perform the same makeover miracle again and again by storing styles and saving your own predefined tables for later reuse. Before you dig into this interior decoration, though, you’ll learn about organizing the structure of your table, starting with rows and columns.