What is Numbers & Charts?

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Download Numbers & Charts for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

Compatibility notes

When you’re in the realm of boring software, it’s difficult to think of anything more boring than spreadsheets. Adrenaline Software fights the boredom with its Numbers & Charts software. This duo of OpenDoc parts does virtually everything that Microsoft Excel does (including macros), and in the graphing department, it blows that bloated application right out of the water.

Numbers

Numbers is the more conservative of the two parts. On its face, Numbers is just a matrix of cells with a couple of floating windows and a menu bar. And that’s the beauty of Numbers: its simplicity. There’s no border of toolbars, buttons, and tabs to get in the way of your work.

Instead, the floating windows act as tool palettes, giving you quick access to formatting and formula commands without permanently sucking up valuable visual real estate.

There is no surviving in the spreadsheet market without making allowances for Excel. Numbers imports Excel files (as well as SYLK and tab-delimited files).

For Excel files with multiple worksheets, however. Numbers imports only one sheet at a time. Numbers exports its files in several formats, including DIF, tab-delimited text, and SYLK, and it also exports spreadsheets as HTML files for easy Web table creation. Although Numbers doesn’t offer the complete range of formulas found in Excel, it does sport 149 spreadsheet functions.

Numbers also has lots of useful features, such as multiple undo, precision formatting of spreadsheets, and support for macros, ColorSync, and AppleScript. And because Numbers is an OpenDoc container, you can drag and drop the usual range of OpenDoc items — such as images, QuickTime movies, and Cyberitems — onto a spreadsheet via Cyberdog.

Charts

Charts is Numbers’ wild sibling. By taking advantage of QuickDraw 3D and OpenDoc, Charts creates 3D graphs that float in space and can be rotated just like any other QuickDraw 3D file. What’s more, Charts allows you to drag just about any image, texture, 3DMF object, or QuickTime movie onto the chart. Want a graph in the shape of a rotating 3D donut with a QuickTime movie of flames mapped onto it while it floats in front of a backdrop of white, fluffy clouds? No problem. Charts can even make your donut translucent if you have 3D acceleration hardware installed.

Choose from 23 chart types, control lighting on 3D objects, animate graphs to rotate in space by themselves, and even export animated graphs as QuickTime movies suitable for a presentation or as a stand-alone display. Charts benefits from 3D acceleration hardware, and you can use third-party plug-in renderers for extra-special charts.

A couple of tips when working with Numbers & Charts: Use the OpenDoc control panel to give both parts at least 2MB of RAM for a comfortable working space. If you plan to do a high-resolution export from Charts, you’ll need to up its memory partition. Also, make sure you have the most current version of all the support software (OpenDoc, Object Support Lib, QuickDraw 3D). We had some difficulties using Numbers & Charts until we updated, then everything went swimmingly.

Although not an Excel terminator. Numbers & Charts does what you need a spreadsheet to do, plays nicely with Excel, and allows you to make killer graphs. The 3D capabilities of Charts are a ton of fun, even if you don’t care much about spreadsheets. And if you do care about spreadsheets. Numbers & Charts will do great things for your numbers and charts.

Reynolds, David. (September 1997). Numbers & Charts. MacAddict. (pg. 64).

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver