The future of Mac spreadsheets
I have seen the future of spreadsheets, and it comes in the form of Tables. With all the hype about a possible addition to the iWork collection from Apple, I was surprised to see software like this popping up, but I have been pleasantly surprised.
Tables shares many similarities with Excel in the way it operates and the formula system, however Tables is truely a masterpiece of interface design, and it is only of 0.18b. There are also extensive formatting options for styling the cells as well as custom styles which can be set by the user and then applied to any cell (or group of cells) with one click. And one of the best things about it, it imports and exports Excel, OO.o and ODF spreadsheet files with almost no trouble, a real plus for someone who is switching to Mac and has a lot of baggage in the form of spreadsheets.
To say that Macs are supposed to be ‘creative machines’ and PCs are supposed to be ‘work machines’, I would say that Tables is a big two-fingers to PCs, Excel and Microsoft. However I don’t know what kind of effect Tables will have on “Charts” (the current name for the new iWork app) and vice versa. We shall have to wait and see.
[edit] As an addendum, and a reply to one of the comments, I’d just like to point out that when I said “imports and exports Excel, OO.o and ODF spreadsheet files with almost no trouble”, I simply meant that it has worked fine with all of the Excel files that I have tried out, however that is no guarantee that every single feature in each and every Excel file you can think of will work and I’m sure there will be some things that won’t work at the moment, that’s why it’s still in Beta. [/edit]
Filed under: Apple, Software, Technology | 11 Comments
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This is at least a year away from being useful. The lack of formulas and AWOL charts make it just slightly more useful than a calculator. Charging for such a nascent beta takes a lot of guts.
And don’t get me wrong. I hate Excel. I’m rooting for Tables. If only Corel would revice it’s WordPerfect Suite for Linux as a Mac program…
What about Google Spreadsheet?
Don’t you think that the possibility to collaborate blows away a lot of other features?
Anyway thanks for the news.
] marcomkc [
I wonder if the code base for Tables is the same as WingZ/Resolve’s? I was a big WingZ fan—actually dumped Excel—way back from the 80s. WingZ code base was used to create Apple’s Resolve software in the early 90s . . . Apple summarily dumped Resolve, like so many other spreadsheets, because Excel was being adopted by everyone.
Software has suffered greatly as a results of Microsoft’s dominance, and I am always hoping that some of these older code bases are reused. Fact is, software was more efficient back then because it had to be small with a low memory footprint.
excelant
What does “exports Excel…with almost no trouble” mean? And what about imports for Excel? I’d like a program that will “just work” with Excel files so I can modify them without the hassel of import/export, especially for shared files. I suppose that program is MS Excel for Mac.
Can it work well with the open-sourced OpenOffice? I use Fedora Linux, and this is my office suite.
Thanks for pointing me to this – great to know about.
In my opinion: Macs are creative & work machines, PCs are for gamers with no life.
the future of spreadsheets is perhaps in the form of Tables or Excel
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If it could be more like Improv or Quantrix or Flexisheet it will be more interesting and easy to use and more powerfull.
These spreadsheets are multi-dimensional (maximum 12 dimensions) instead of having 2 or with difficulty 3 dimensions like traditional ones.
More, instead of having no more than one formula viewable, you can see all of your formulas in the lower part of the window.
The formulas are writed in natural language like: “MacPro Price + VAT = Public Price” not “A1+c47=d32″. You just have to look at the bottom of the window to understand your formulas.
If you want to see your spreadsheet in a totally different way don’t rebuild it, you just have to drag and drop from one location one or many dimensions to another location and instantly and MAGICALLY it will be rebuild and your formulas stay OK.
Take a look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv
http://www.materialarts.com/FlexiSheet/index.html
http://www.quantrix.com/
Does anyone remember Mindsight? It was an incredible late 1980s program light years ahead of Excel. It was simple. You could easily create formulas and what ifs and goal seeking with it for financial planning and modeling. It was the single best financial program I have ever seen. It was developed by a company developing software for the oil industry. I was interested in buying the source code, but the company that owned the software had been sold three or four times to much larger entities and the software and company just disappeared. We could find no one who knew who owned the software and where the source code was. If Apple computer is smart, a new Mindsight is what they would bring out.
I downloaded Tables to look at it, and it is very promising.
For OSX users who want a mature, non-MS spreadsheet now, you might want to look at Mesa:
Mesa was a NextStep/OPENStep product that I’ve been using for years. It’s a traditional spreadsheet–not 3D