Mac Numbers now supports LAMBDA functions and MAP (opens in new tab)

Google Sheets does have this feature. But it was fairly recent. Numbers had it for a long time and in any case I still prefer the implementation in Numbers. In Numbers, data is referenced through these tables exclusively while getting rid of sheet-level references; tables in Google Sheets do not go that far. My mental model for tables in Numbers is just sheets but relocatable and multiple can be viewed at the same time. My mental model for tables in Sheets is just it helps me with formatting and with referencing the entirety of the data like an upgraded named range.

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/14239833?hl=en

This feature goes back to Lotus Improv, a spreadsheet that ran on NeXTStep back in the day.

The Wikipedia article even mentions Numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv

I always thought that Apple’s productivity suite was the same app but with different UI wrappers.

Tables in Pages behave similar to Numbers spreadsheets. Pages layout mode is very similar to Keynote. Data vis in Keynote is the same as Numbers.

With some functionality that differs to the tables in excel?

Because you can have multiple tables in a single sheet in excel, but I guess the columns filters don't play nicely with multiple tables.

I feel like you used to be able to do this in Excel, as sheets instead of tables, that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

A really nice thing I noticed about Pages is that if you use the defaults, your document turns out very nicely typeset with zero extra effort, at least to my untrained eyes. Which you’d expect from Apple and maybe any word processor, but I can’t say I’ve had that baseline experience with others.

Same for me. I cringe when I have to resort to MS Office to deal with some janky external doc or another. Excel has a gazillion functions. Numbers has less coverage, but it implements them pleasantly in a Mac-assed Mac app.

Same with Pages vs Word. I'm sure has power features some people can't live without. I can live without ‘em, in exchange for getting an ergonomic app that runs nicely on my OS.

I'd reach for Pages every time over Word, which, ironically, in my opinion is not very good at processing words. (99% of the time I use iA Writer in a Markdown workflow. If I specifically need WYSIWYG for something, it’s Pages every time.)

Pages greatly confused me the first time I tried to use it, several years ago. That's because it included a bunch of templates for different kinds of documents, and when you created a new document from one of those templates the document was full of text and images.

That text was Lorem ipsum [1]. I had never seen that before and assumed that I had somehow gotten the templates for some other language installed with my English Pages install.

I then spent a few hours trying to figure out how to change template language settings or install English templates.

I eventually copies some of the text and Googled it, hoping to find someone else who had this problem and had found the fix and then learned about Lorem ipsum.

Nowadays when you create a document from the templates that come with Pages the placeholder text is in your language and is usage instructions for the template.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum

It depends on your use case. I wouldn't use numbers for anything large or complex but it's really quite a pleasure for smaller things, like invoices or planning.

It does import/export Excel.

If you are using significant amounts of data, Excel even on Mac is light years ahead of Numbers I’ve found. And probably still slower than Excel on Windows. My experience was using pivot tables with 80k-100k rows and maybe 20 columns. Excel was instant and Numbers took dozens of seconds of UI completely frozen to update the table.

Oh wow, thanks!

people saving work as .numbers instead of MSFT's formats.

Great question, but I'd probably have to try it to have a good answer!

For the Excel web application I’m guessing