Comments on: Excel 2008: Cell format problem not just with existing Excel 2004 files

By: Paul Ingraham

Paul Ingraham — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 08:04:00 +0000

Numbers has a few missing features that deal breakers for a lot of Excel users, unfortunately. For me, it’s the inability to freeze header rows. I’m making the transition, but painfully, and it’s going to stay painful until I can freeze rows!

As usual, Pierre, you point out subtleties with significance. I couldn’t easily see the problem your were describing in this post at first, but I trusted you to make it matter, and you did.

Alan: Good observation about entropy in large old code bases, and I’m sure that’s a factor. But Pierre is often pointing out problems with Office that are not the consequences of inadequate resources, neglect and chaos, but of choices — really bad choices — that the Office developers actually went out of their way to make. This kind of thing has to also be in large part a case of institutional dementia, of a corporate culture that bullies and overwhelms the good judgement of the many intelligent individuals who must work there.

They must be there, the intelligent individuals! They must! And yet something goes wrong, and the products are almost a parody of good design.

By: Pierre Igot

Pierre Igot — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:40:13 +0000

My main beef with Numbers at this point is a common problem with Apple’s applications, i.e. the lack of support for keyboard shortcuts/navigation. I hate having to switch the mouse all the time. But other than that, of course it is much nicer. The transition is already in progress as far as I am concerned :-).

By: AlanY

AlanY — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 21:10:30 +0000

In one sense I feel sorry for the Office developers… it’s a small team and clearly they’re being overwhelmed by the amount of entropy that sets in with a large, old code base. On the other hand, it’s also an enormously profitable product and one for which they could hire an adequate number of developers and testers. (Mythical Man Month aside, time spent on refactoring can make a difference, as it did with Office 2007.)

That said, Numbers is genuinely the better product anyway. It’s missing some core stuff (pivot tables, macros, some key types of charts, etc.), but it’s so much nicer to use for personal spreadsheets.