The Mac Lawyer Using Macs in Law Firms | Attorney Ben Stevens

Office Suite Smackdown :: Excel 2008 vs. Numbers ’08

By J. Benjamin Stevens on Posted in Product Reviews, Software

Numbers_v_excel
This is the second article about Macworld‘s series of articles that comparing Apple’s iWork ’08 programs with their Microsoft Office 2008 programs to determine which is better.  Rob Griffiths conducted this analysis of Numbers ’08 versus Excel 2008.

Mr. Griffiths concluded that while Numbers can create a prettier spreadsheet, Excel is simpler to use.  Specifically, he found that Excel offers more formulas, features, and tools to help
with actually building the spreadsheet. 

He specifically cited the following concerns about Numbers:  its inability to simply show a
formula’s variables as you enter it; its lack of keyboard support in
selecting ranges when you’re entering formulas; its lack of custom
number and date formats; and its limited conditional formatting
abilities.

Source:  "Excel 2008 vs. Numbers ’08" by Rob Griffiths, published at Macworld.

  • http://www.lawyers.com/ware Ware

    Right after I bought iWork’08 I had a trial in Miami-Dade County.. As usual I faced the infamous problem of creating a court and courtroom specific jury selection chart. For those of you who do not try cases jury boxes differ vastly from courtroom to courtroom and the arrangement of the venire panel in the box (where Number 1 sits relative to the bench and in which row) is judge dependent.
    Using Numbers ’08, I created a template in about ten minutes. My template is easily adaptable to jury box configurations. Since I created it, I have refined it and created a similar template for Broward County.
    Most importantly I use a rating system on each prospective juror (0-100) where the best jurors appear in green, the worst in red, and the in-betweens remain in white. At a glance I can see my initial assessment of the entire panel.
    Now does Excel have some number crunching abilities in excess of Numbers? Unquestionably. But I am a lawyer not an actuary. For ten years I tried to do this in Excel without success. I did it in ten minutes in Numbers.

  • http://resipsablog.com Benson

    Hi Ben, that link to the article on MacWorld has one too many “http”s in front of it. Thanks for the heads up. I’ve been checking you site for a couple of weeks, and have found your site to be very informative. I am hoping to make the PC to Mac jump over the summer.

  • Biagio Bucaro

    I own both products. I disagree that it is easier to layout in word than pages. I love how pages deals with images and font placement. However as an attorney I need to work with longer documents and not having an autosave feature in pages is the deal breaker for day to day use. At least three times Pages has crashed on me and data was lost. An hour of time for a lawyer repeatedly wasted can get you fired quickly. I do save roughly once per hour normally but its nice to have an autosave that deals with the in between times.
    Additionally, the translator from Pages to Mac Word 2004 was horrible. I have no idea about the pages 08 to word 08 translation as I haven’t tried it.
    So for frequent use items: client intake forms, fax cover sheets & quick correspondence I prefer pages for everything else I use word 08.
    One excuse could be that the problems with pages failing came within weeks of installing. Perhaps pages was less stable then.
    I really wanted to use pages as a replacement especially considering that office took 5 years between upgrades (and don’t get me started on how little they did with entourage) but unfortunately I don’t trust Pages enough. Maybe next year.