iWork® For Dummies,® 2nd Edition

Chapter 13

Getting to Know Numbers

In This Chapter

Finding out why tables matter

Exploring the Numbers window

Using the Numbers toolbar

You’ve never seen a spreadsheet like a Numbers spreadsheet. Something about spreadsheets turns even the most imaginative and creative person into a zombie wandering through a maze with an infinite number of rows and columns. Well, in most cases, it’s not infinite — in Microsoft Excel, somewhere around 1 million rows and 16,000 columns give you 17 billion cells you can use in your spreadsheet.

Numbers can be described in many ways, but one of the most direct ways is this: Numbers gives you every tool and technique the people of Apple could think of to help you manage your data without getting lost in 17 billion cells on a single spreadsheet. This chapter gives you an introduction to Numbers, starting with the basic design that tames spreadsheets and continuing with a guide to the features and functions in the Numbers window.

Of all the iWork apps, Numbers is the one with the fewest differences between Mac OS X and iOS.

Taming the Spreadsheet Jungle with Tables

In 1979, at the dawn of the personal computer era, the VisiCalc spreadsheet program, written ...