Don't be surprised :-)
Even Rob Griffiths -who has criticized Excel and praised Numbers- wrote that "Excel is still the best spreadsheet app on the Mac, by far" on his review of Microsoft Excel 2008 (Macworld).
I haven't done any charting recently in Excel. I never liked the bloat this created, and as you mention Excel can become unresponsive.
I will sometimes create simple charts in Excel but more commonly I will use an additional application. I haven't used Chartsmith recently ( http://www.blacksmith.com/ ) but I used it with great results to do the charts for a workbook with multiple worksheets, linked calculations and "mega-formulas." I have not worked with large data sets with Excel 2008 yet. I've been trying some stuff using ProVUE Panorama, but eventually will work with Excel 2008 and larger sets.
I am intrigued by Quantrix as well. Still, compared to Numbers I do feel that Excel is superior.
Out of curiosity I just downloaded a large data set. A 31.6 MB text file which became a 35.3 MB xlsx file. Eight columns and almost one million rows (990,823 excluding header). I picked a column and formatted the cells as numbers. Excel was a bit slow, but still responded to formulas such as average, median, sum, etc. I was able to create 4 charts very quickly. I just sorted the data and picked a few numbers to create some Column and Bar Charts.
On the other hand Numbers could not import the complete text file, resulting in "Import Warning - Tables with more than 255 columns and 65,533 rows aren’t supported. Columns 256 and higher and rows 65,534 and higher were removed.) Trying to import the xlsx file yielded a couple of additional error messages.
It's unrealistic to expect people to use such data sets, but still Excel showed its capabilities and Numbers showed its limitations.
For tips on optimizing Excel's performance you may want to check out some of the work by John Walkenbach http://spreadsheetpage.com/ or http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa730921.aspx which is focused on Excel 2007 but may have ideas applicable to the Mac version. I have not read it so I don't know.
In case you're interested, the file is nonemp07co.zip from the US Census.
I hope this clarifies my comment.
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Review after updating - epc
Don't be surprised :-)Even Rob Griffiths -who has criticized Excel and praised Numbers- wrote that "Excel is still the best spreadsheet app on the Mac, by far" on his review of Microsoft Excel 2008 (Macworld).
I haven't done any charting recently in Excel. I never liked the bloat this created, and as you mention Excel can become unresponsive.
I will sometimes create simple charts in Excel but more commonly I will use an additional application. I haven't used Chartsmith recently ( http://www.blacksmith.com/ ) but I used it with great results to do the charts for a workbook with multiple worksheets, linked calculations and "mega-formulas." I have not worked with large data sets with Excel 2008 yet. I've been trying some stuff using ProVUE Panorama, but eventually will work with Excel 2008 and larger sets.
I am intrigued by Quantrix as well. Still, compared to Numbers I do feel that Excel is superior.
Out of curiosity I just downloaded a large data set. A 31.6 MB text file which became a 35.3 MB xlsx file. Eight columns and almost one million rows (990,823 excluding header). I picked a column and formatted the cells as numbers. Excel was a bit slow, but still responded to formulas such as average, median, sum, etc. I was able to create 4 charts very quickly. I just sorted the data and picked a few numbers to create some Column and Bar Charts.
On the other hand Numbers could not import the complete text file, resulting in "Import Warning - Tables with more than 255 columns and 65,533 rows aren’t supported. Columns 256 and higher and rows 65,534 and higher were removed.) Trying to import the xlsx file yielded a couple of additional error messages.
It's unrealistic to expect people to use such data sets, but still Excel showed its capabilities and Numbers showed its limitations.
For tips on optimizing Excel's performance you may want to check out some of the work by John Walkenbach http://spreadsheetpage.com/ or http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa730921.aspx which is focused on Excel 2007 but may have ideas applicable to the Mac version. I have not read it so I don't know.
In case you're interested, the file is nonemp07co.zip from the US Census.
I hope this clarifies my comment.
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Monday, July 20 2009 @ 06:38 PM PDT