RexinMinn wrote:I was doing what you said to do, but only for a select grouping of values in the column.
I do not like that this program is so restrictive in this way. I realized that I needed to select the entire column before converting to "numbers" via the inspector.
Not sure why you had to select the entire column, as I'm not looking over your shoulder, and can't see what you're changing or what you need to change. Numbers is much like any Mac application (or Windows application, for that matter) in following the basic pattern: Select something, then apply a change to it. Only what is selected will be changed.
At least Numbers, unlike AppleWorks, gives us the opportunity to format a cell to treat its contents as Text (without having to use the workaround tricks necessary to do this in AW). Try typing this library card number into an AW spreadsheet cell: 21234001085965
In Numbers, all that's necessary to have it display correctly (as a string of digits) is to format the cell as Text. AppleWorks doesn't support formatting a cell to do that.
It is possible to enter a number into an AppleWorks SS cell in a way that causes AppleWorks to treat it as Text. If you do so, you'll find that for SUM() in AppleWorks any text string has a numeric value of zero, just as it does in Numbers.
In Appleworks, Spreadsheet was much more user friendly. The tech people need to find out what people liked about Spreadsheet in AW and apply it to Numbers. They've made using the spreadsheet software MUCH LESS user-friendly, and that's NOT what I expect from Apple.
Sometimes "more user-friendly" is just another way of saying "what I'm used to." You might be surprised by the number of long-time MS Excel users who find Excel 'much more user-friendly'' than either Numbers or AppleWorks. It's certainly not a sentiment I share, but I don't use Excel all that much. For someone who uses it on a daily basis, there are undoubtedly things that muscle memory alone will make seem 'more friendly' than trying to do essentially the same thing on a different platform.
As to "The tech people need to find out...," why not tell them? If you have specific behaviours you'd like to see incorporated into Numbers, a user-to-user forum like this one isn't the place to do it. Talk to Apple. Numbers, like most other current Apple software makes it easy to do that.
Under Mac OS X, every application has an Application menu. It's the one next to the blue Apple logo, and has the name of the active application. Click on the Numbers menu in Numbers and you'll see an item named "Provide Numbers Feedback." Select that, and you'll be taken to a Feedback form. Anything posted there goes directly to Apple, where it does get read. You won't get any direct response to most feedback, but judging from the changes between numbers '08 and Numbers '09, Apple does pay attention to the feedback, and does incorporate some of the suggested changes in future versions of the software.
Regards,
Barry