Formulate your future with Numbers
Go beyond the built-in templates and gain skills that’ll help to keep you one step ahead in life
Dig deeper into Apple’s spreadsheet app than its templates. Whether you need to track your budget, monitor investments or plan a project, these quick tips will get you started.
1 The Function button
If you’re an Excel emigrant and miss its AutoSum function, Numbers offers a versatile alternative: select a series of cells and choose one of the common functions from the toolbar’s Function button. Numbers inserts the function’s calculation in the nearest empty cell above or to the side of the selection.
2 Quick calculations
Numbers’ Quick Calculation bar only appears at the bottom of the window when a range of cells is selected. Its capsules hold at-a-glance calculations for your selection – their average, sum, and so on – that you can drag to a table cell to keep around. But you aren’t limited to default functions: click the gear button on the right of the bar to edit what’s available here.
3 Filter a checklist
Don’t think of Numbers only as a spreadsheet. It makes for a great organiser, too. For example, use it to create an easily updated checklist. Write your to-do list down one column and then add a cell with a data format of ‘Checkbox’ next to each element that's included in the list.
In the Sort and Filter Inspector, filter the table by the checkbox column. Choose a filtering rule to match text that is ‘False’. Now as you check items off the list, they’ll disappear from view.
4 Quickly add cells
Numbers has many keyboard shortcuts, but this one is arguably the handiest: To add a column or row next to a highlighted cell, hold down and press the arrow key that corresponds to the direction in which you want to add a row or column, relative to the cell that is currently selected. No more messing around with menus!
5 Copy from old versions
To recover a deleted table or sheet, choose File > Revert To > Browse All Versions. Scroll back to the version with the elements you want to retrieve, select them and then choose Edit > Copy. In the current spreadsheet (on the left), click where you want to place the content, then choose Edit > Paste.
6 Take visual stock
Some of the Stock function’s features are demoed in the My Stocks template, but you can go further and use conditional highlighting to get a visual view of your portfolio’s performance. The following formula, when added to a cell, will display the percentage change in Apple’s stock price compared to its close yesterday: =STOCK ("AAPL", percent change)
With this cell selected, go to the Format inspectors’ Cells tab and click the Conditional Highlighting button. In the pane that appears, set a rule to change the cell’s background colour to red if its value is less than 0 (a fall in share price). Add a second rule to change the background to green if the value is greater than 0 (a rise in value).
Quickly reuse these rules by copying the cell’s formatting – but not its value – with and paste them to another cell with
7 Relatives and absolutes
If a formula contains a reference to another cell, copying it to another cell updates the reference relative to its new position. To maintain a cell reference, prefix it with a dollar sign ($) when typing a formula to designate it ’absolute’. Or, double-click a cell to edit its existing formula, click the small disclosure triangle next to the cell reference, and choose whether to maintain the row, column, or both.