Given the identical naming of Numbers for iPad and Numbers (in iWork’09), you may be expecting the iPad version of Numbers to be a clone of its desktop counterpart. While it replicates many of the features of the desktop version, Numbers on the iPad is a ground-up rewrite of the application that is focused on creating and working with spreadsheets directly on the iPad.
Numbers For iPad – Start a Spreadsheet
Numbers for iPad automatically opens to its spreadsheet browser, which shows all of the spreadsheets on your iPad. You can create as many as you’d like, until you run out of RAM on your iPad. You flip through your sheets with a finger flick, and each screen contains a preview of the sheet, its name, and a time stamp showing when it was last modified. The spreadsheet browser is also where you share your spreadsheets; you can send them via Mail, share them via iWork.com, or export them to Numbers or PDF format. Once you’ve exported a spreadsheet, you can access it from the Apps tab in iTunes (with your iPad connected to your Mac or Windows machine) and transfer it.
A prominent New Spreadsheet button brings up Numbers’ template chooser, where you’ll find 15 new templates designed to focus on expected uses of Numbers on the iPad. For example, there’s a simple checklist template, a loan comparison template, an auto log for tracking car mileage and maintenance, a team organization template for coaches, and some templates targeted at educational use—GPA tracking, a stats lab, and an attendance form.
Numbers For iPad – Work with Spreadsheets
The spreadsheet interface is easy to understand. Tabs along the top of the screen show each sheet; you can flick the tabs to see the sheets that are currently off-screen. Above the tabs, a minimalist toolbar contains buttons that let you return to the spreadsheet browser; undo or redo your last 200 actions, even after you close a spreadsheet; format items; insert new media, tables, charts, or shapes on the current sheet; find text in your spreadsheet; view help; and check spelling.
The last button in the toolbar toggles Numbers for iPad into full-screen mode, which provides an interface-free view of your worksheet. You can’t do much in full-screen mode, with one exception: You can select a cell or range of cells, and Numbers will display a floating window with some basic stats about your selection, including sum, minimum and maximum, average, and count. Flick this small floating window once to see a graph of the selected cells.
Tap a cell in a table once to select it. Tap the vertical or horizontal bar that appears above a table after selecting a cell to select the entire column or row. Once you’ve selected it, you can resize the column or row by dragging a small resize widget in the header of the selected area, move the column or row by dragging anywhere else in the header area, or select more cells by dragging the blue dot on the edge of the selection.
The first tap on a cell in Numbers for iPad selects that cell; a double-tap brings up the cell editor, where you can enter text, date and time values, figures, or functions (over 250 are available). Each of these input modes has its own customized keyboard, greatly easing the data input task.
A bigger limitation on text is that you can’t control the font face or size for text in tables on a sheet—you can add bold, italic, underline, or strike-through, and you can change the color, but not the face or size. (You can control fonts in text boxes and charts, just not in tables). You can format cells in tables in a number of ways, including a star rating format (zero to five stars). Though you won’t find steppers, sliders, or pop-up menus in Numbers for iPad. Still, for its intended use, it offers a good amount of control over the appearance and behavior of cells.
Numbers For iPad – Work with Objects
Like its desktop cousin, Numbers for iPad supports multiple objects per worksheet. You can easily add photos, tables, charts, and objects to a sheet. Numbers offers multiple versions of tables, charts, and objects to choose from, and you can customize your selection. Add a shape, for example, and you can change its fill color and opacity; border color, style, and thickness; and type of shadow (or opt for no shadow). This degree of control makes it possible to create some very nice-looking spreadsheets, as a quick tour of the provided templates will show. You can resize one object to match another by beginning a resize drag, and then tapping the other object with another finger.
Numbers For iPad – Work with Forms
A new feature in Numbers for iPad, forms are designed to make it easier to enter data in your spreadsheet. To use Forms, you first design your table (or tables) and then tap the plus sign on the tab bar. A pop-up menu lets you choose a new form or new sheet; choose a form, and you’ll see a page that shows all the tables on all your sheets. Select one table from that list to instantly create a form from that table.
A form is really nothing more than a different view of an existing table on a sheet. For instance, if you create a form from a six-row, sevencolumn table, the resulting form will contain six separate “pages” (table rows) that you can flip through. Each page will take its title from the first column in the selected table, and below that, the remaining six columns in this example will appear as six single-line inputs.
At the bottom of the form, arrow buttons let you flip between pages, as well as add or delete them. Delete a page, and you’ll delete the corresponding row from the original table. That’s because the form is directly linked to the table you selected when you created it—the associated table instantly reflects any changes made on the form. The big advantage to this method is that it’s much simpler to enter data using a form than it is to try to tap into each cell and type in the original worksheet.
One downside of forms is that they won’t survive a round-trip to and from your Mac—if you export a worksheet to your Mac, edit it there, and reimport it to your iPad, any forms you created will be gone. The good news is that re-creating a form takes only a couple of taps, so it’s not a huge amount of lost time.
Numbers For iPad – Compatibility
The Numbers iPad app can read the following file formats: Numbers ’09 (desktop application; .numbers), Microsoft Excel (.xls, .xlsx, .xlt, .xltx, .xlsm, and .xla) and comma-separated values (.csv). It can export files from Numbers ’09 into Microsoft Excel (.xls) and PDF file formats.
Font support on Numbers for iPad is limited to the 40 or so fonts available on the iPad; you can’t import fonts with your spreadsheet, and Numbers for iPad will substitute any missing fonts with the closest available ones. The iPad version is missing a few Numbers for Mac features as well: You can’t use merged cells, pop-ups, steppers, sliders, or conditional formatting (and a number of other minor items). As a result, you may have to rework the formatting of spreadsheets you move onto the iPad.
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