Recently, Apple introduced iWork ‘08, an upgrade to the ‘office productivity’ suite they provide. The big news here is that they finally introduced a modern spreadsheet product, Numbers to replace the aging AppleWorks.
Now the first thing I did with Numbers is see if it bests Excel on one of its stupidest ‘features,’ namely, Excel can only have 65,536 rows in a table.
So I create a small CSV file with two columns and 70,000 rows, and import it into Mac Excel 2004. As expected, “not all the data can be loaded,” and I’m stuck with 65,536 rows.
For those of you wondering why 65,536, it’s the number of distinct integers that can be represented in a 16-bit number - hello! this is the 21st century, we’ve moved on, we can do bigger numbers now!
So surely a modern spreadsheet app on a modern computer can handle more than that? After all it’s not lumbered with a crumbling codebase from the Duran Duran era!
Excitedly (yea, I should get a life) I import the same CSV into Numbers.
WTF?!
The file wasnt imported because the amount of data exceeded the maximum table size. - Excess rows or columns were removed.
Numbers only managed to import 65,533 rows!
OK, you can get another couple, but not via the import…. worse, it took over 20 seconds to import the CSV vs almost instantaneous in Excel… and Excel was running under a PowerPC emulator.
Come on Apple, this is shocking. Stop playing with your iPhone and put proper effort into your software.
4 Comments
I’m not sure what’s worse. The fact that Apple are releasing code with such shocking features, or that you spent time investigating this and discovering that it suffered from said feature
Is iLife or iWork worth upgrading to?
well, i had the iwork 08 trial so seemed reasonable to give it a go - i’d say iwork 08 is not worth it if you already have office, which i do thanks to ubs home use program
ilife 08 - i don’t have trials of those, so can’t say, but will almost certainly pick up a copy in NY next month - assuming the £:$ rate doesn’t go titsup.
yes, extremely frustrating, i bought numbers to HOPE it would solve this major issue!! it didn’t. Anyhow, what program will open a spreadsheet with more than 65,533 lines? any suggestions?
I thougt the latest OpenOffice might do it, but it’s still just copying MS Office from the last century - no innovation there
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