iWork® '09 For Dummies®

Chapter 12. Getting to Know Numbers

In This Chapter

• Finding out why tables matter

• Exploring the Numbers window

• Using the Numbers toolbar

You've never seen a spreadsheet like a Numbers spreadsheet. Something about spreadsheets turns even the most imaginative and creative person into a zombie wandering through a maze with an infinite number of rows and columns. Well, in most cases it's not infinite — in Microsoft Excel, somewhere around 1 million rows and 16,000 columns give you 17 billion cells you can use in your spreadsheet.

Numbers can be described in many ways, but one of the most direct is this: Numbers gives you every tool and technique the people of Apple could think of to help you manage your data without getting lost in 17 billion cells on a single spreadsheet. This chapter gives you an introduction to Numbers, starting with the basic design that tames spreadsheets and continuing with a guide to the features and functions in the Numbers window.

Taming the Spreadsheet Jungle with Tables

In 1979, at the dawn of the personal computer era, the VisiCalc spreadsheet program, written for the Apple II, was one of the most popular programs. It was a fair representation of large accounting sheets with rows and columns that could accept any kind of data you entered. One spreadsheet was one file.

People quickly started bumping up against that limitation, and two changes came about over time:

• Tables within spreadsheets: Even though early spreadsheets were smaller than today's models, they still ...