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I think iLife ‘08 has some amazing potential, particularly that I finally have a reason to take simple movie clips with my point&shoot camera, but iWork ‘08 caught my attention. Read: Numbers, the application I have been waiting for. My copy is in the mail, at the moment, so the 30-day trial version will have to do.

I write a lot of technical documents for various technical courses and the research, requiring a hefty amalgam of charts and graphs. The first chore is always organizing the data and then making sure Excel translates it correctly into a graphical form. Then, the second chore is formatting it to no end to make sure it is not instantly distinguished as a generic, default Excel graph. But, Excel formatting is terrible, atrocious, and as generic-looking as faux table flowers at a 3-star Italian restaurants. People see Excel graphs and must glean the data. That’s simply the wrong way of consuming a graph.

So, let me take some quickly manufactured data that could supplement this type of inquiry and throw it into Excel for a basic 3-D bar graph. Whiz-bang, here we go.

The remarkable thing about that graph is that it’s not even 3-D. It uses parallelograms to make the bars look like they have a depth, when in fact shadowing, lighting, and textures define a third dimensionality. Numbers will take the same data and create something beautiful for me to throw into a report.

Sigh! What took Apple so long to get this in my hands?! Oh, wait, of course… iPhone. Somehow, Numbers was also able to spot my favorite font, Helvetica Neue, and made it my default. I’m not sure if other people come across this anomaly, but it made me grin. All-in-all, a graph should be formatted so that the data is digested and not excavated. The default formatting of Excel is so elementary that I might as well print my report on a dot-matrix system and retain the same quality of presentation and expect the same efficiency for those consuming my product. Numbers takes the pain out of formatting.

The true test of graphing is the pie chart - true, a dying form of plot, but nevertheless still popular and easy to digest. Here, Excel will take my previous data and make a pie chart. All default here…

Can’t you just hear Excel vomiting? Excel is not made for presentations outside of your cubicle, but for office pranks and medicinal subscription spam. Numbers knows the ropes, though.

While Excel was vomiting in the master bathroom over its attempt at a pie chart, I had to rush to the guest half-bath in order to not wet my pants from seeing the inspiring beauty of Number’s first pie chart plot. And check this out…

An explode slider bar! You haven’t lived until you manually explode a pie chart. Even better, clicking on an individual slice allows you to explode it separately. I can see myself using these types of chart-formatting options in lab reports or whatnot, screen-shotting the space and then drag-dropping into a report. So what if the chart lines are still visible? Instant Alpha in Pages & Keynote can instantly eliminate that stuff! Even leaving the lines there puts a peer’s Excel-based report to shame.

This is not what I was anticipating from Numbers; I actually had more conservative hopes. I use Excel frequently and understand its limits, often hitting them and, consequently, lowering my head in frustration, asking how long I care to troubleshoot the problems. The transition from Excel to Numbers seems to be analogous to my purchase of a semi-luxurious queen mattress after having lived for years on campus-owned twins. I have room to stretch and can land from the wrong direction and still be comfortable with the results.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 8:33 pm and is filed under , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.