10 Useful Mac Numbers Templates

Numbers comes with a variety of useful templates. You can use these in your daily life, or dissect them to learn how they work and learn some spreadsheet skills.

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Video Transcript: Did you know that your Mac comes with a mortgage calculator, an event planner, a team organizer and other utilities. These aren't separate apps. But Templates in Numbers. 
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So often I'm asked about how to do something in Numbers and sometimes my answer is simply there's already a template for that. Numbers comes with a large of collection of built-in templates that handle some of the most common spreadsheet needs. So when you launch Numbers you may end up with a dialogue like this asking you to open a file. If you do click New Document. You'll end up here. This is also where you may start. This is where you can choose a template. You can see there are a lot of different templates that Apple provides that are part of Numbers. You can click on the categories here to the left or just scroll through them. In each category sometimes you can scroll left and right to see more. 
So let's start off by taking a look at this simple budget. This is a very basic template but it also could be one of the most useful. Here you can simply enter in all of your income in this table. You can enter your expenses in this table. Then you get a result here with the money you have left over every month plus a chart showing you where you are spending the most money. Now it is easy to modify this table for your needs. Obviously if you want to change something, like change this, you can just change it. It's just a piece of text there. You can also change something else like maybe like that. If you want to add something more just pressing Return will add another row here and you can see how it pushes everything  down nicely so you can put something like that. Then you can just type what you want here. So let's put something like that and something like that. You can see how it adds up. It takes into account that there is a new row here and the same thing here. You can just hit Return after selecting the last row and you can add a new item here and it will add to the total. So this shows you that it is easy to customize this budget spreadsheet to have everything that you want in it. You can make this a personal budget. You can make this a business budget. You can make it a budget for a special project you're working on. Anything you want. 
As with all these templates you can use this to learn Numbers because you can actually look here and see the formulas. See how this is a Sum of this column here. This is the sum right there. This is just subtracting one from the other. The great thing about Numbers is it is kind of like open source. You could see how everything works if you want to investigate the different  cells. 
Now this is one I'm commonly asked about. Calculating mortgages. So under Personal Finance you'll find here on the right a Mortgage Calculator. This is much nicer looking than what you would probably make if you did it yourself. You probably wouldn't take the time to make it look so good. But you have everything you need here. You just need to change the values. So you change the purchase price to what you want. The percent of down payment. You could even use these little buttons here. You could change the interest rate to something else. The mortgage length. All of this stuff and it is going to change everything that you see here and you get to compare, you know, mortgages putting this number right here that you're choosing for your interest rate right in the middle and you can see if it's a little less or a little bit more. Also look at the loan amounts here to see the differences there. 
There's also a similar template here called Loan Comparison. So here it allows you to compare four loans, the principle and interest that you'll be paying, and you can change the values here. So if you want to compare something a little different, like a different percentage rate there or a different length here you can. You can see the changes reflected there and the numbers right here. Notice the values here are actually pretty complex using some functions that are difficult to understand but it is all just done for you. 
Another one to checkout here is one called Retirement Savings. So here you can put your current age, when you want to retire, guess at your life expectancy, and then put what you want your income to be when you retire. How much you want to contribute. All of that. Then it is going to calculate this monthly goal here. Note that all the things you need to enter here and what you need to see are actually in this sheet. There is another sheet here with data. So the calculations are actually being run on this big table here in the second sheet that is kind of hidden from view. You get to see the results here. This is a really good example how some things can't just be calculated with a simple formula. You actually need to run through a whole set of data like this. But you don't necessarily need to see that in the spreadsheet that you're looking at and modifying.
There's also one here called School Savings as well that's pretty similar. How much money you're going to need to put away to save up for school for your kid. It's got a data table here as well. 
Let's move on from financial things and look under the Personal Category. There's a lot of interesting things here. Here's one for Team Organization. So if you run a sports team or you coach a kids team or something like that you can put the information for each of the players in there. You've got multiple sheets. You have one here for a schedule you can fill out. You can keep statistics on the various players and there's even a sheet here for the budget for the team. 
Here's another interesting one. There's Baby Record. Here you can enter in, for each month, height, weight, and other information here. Notes. All of that. You get this nice little height and weight chart. There are also other sheets here like you can keep a daily log and record milestones. 
There's a useful template called Party Planner. You can use this for more than just parties. For any kind of event or maybe modify it for something completely different. So you can setup the budget here on the first sheet. It's got a guest list here. You can have a list of other information and a To Do Checklist right here at the end. This is setup for a party but you can easily modify this for any kind of project really. 
A lot of small businesses use Spreadsheets rather than dedicated software for lots of things. So there are a lot of templates here that deal with that. For instance here's an employee schedule. So if you have a small business, like a retail shop or something, you can use this Employee Schedule as a quick and easy way to keep track of employee hours and when people are working. 
Now even if you just have a side business probably every once in a while you need to provide somebody with an invoice to get paid. Now you could start off a blank Pages document or use an Invoice Template in Pages. But there's a handy one right here in Numbers. So you can simply customize this with all of your information and then go and create a simple little professional looking invoice here without much hassle. 
Finally there's a whole section here on Education. So if you're a teacher or a student there's a few things you can use here. For instance this basic Attendance Sheet here allows you to have all of your students and then a bunch of dates. You can see how you can easily customize this. Just add another couple rows, like that, and put the names in there and everything is setup for it. If you change this first date here, like let's make it November of this year, then select this first one and drag this yellow dot here to AutoFill you could see how you could autofill all the way to the bottom. You can also drag the bottom out there and then continue to autofill to increase the size of the sheet. 
There's also a Gray Book and GPA calculator here and a few things that can be used by students. There's a really cool academic calendar which is neat in that you can change the year and you could see how it changes all the months. You can change the month as well and everything follows through. Then just change this here. Anything you put here isn't going to effect what's on the left here. But you can actually select a day there and, you know, and just make that bold or change its color. 
Now there's actually a lot more than just this. If you look, for instance, under Personal Finance you'll find a template that tracks the stocks you may own. A Shared Expenses template. Under Personal there's a Monthly Calendar. A Daily Schedule. There's a running log that you can keep. Of course you can customize that for other things as well. There's a Home Improvement Project sheet. A Business's Return on Investment and there's a Financial Sheet here. A Break Even Analysis. There's really a lot here that all just comes built into Numbers. You don't have to download this from anywhere. If you have Numbers you have these templates already. Just create a New Document with anyone that you want. Like, for instance, Running Log. Then you can look at it, play around with it, you don't need to save it. You can just close it right there and you haven't actually created anything. Even if you're not going to use these as is, if one of them performs a function you're interested in doing in one of your spreadsheets you can use these templates to see how Apple does it in their sheets. Once you've learned that you can apply it to your own. 
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 8 Responses to “10 Useful Mac Numbers Templates”

Harish Sarma

2 years ago

Thank you for amazing content you are sharing

Thanks Gary. Very useful and very well explained. I had no idea!

Sher

Thanks for providing such great content. This video was so easy to understand and makes using the template for budgeting so much fun too.

Michael

Thanks Gary. Brilliant tutorial. I never thought to check the various templates, but there is something for every requirement. Regards Michael

Jonathan

After watching your videos I decided to transition away from Excel and towards Numbers based on the simplicity of the software. One area that I’m struggling with, however, has to do with placing different types of borders around different areas of my tables. Perhaps it’s due to my inexperience with Numbers, but I’m finding it to be quite cumbersome and I haven’t found a robust method of copying and pasting border formats. Do you address this in your videos or perhaps in your Numbers course?

Gary Rosenzweig

Jonathan: Play around with the borders settings for a cell for a while and you'll get the hang of it. There is a lesson in the course on borders, but nothing you can't figure out with some patience and experimenting.

Gareth Tudor

1 year ago

I need to calculate a loan repayment that is not a mortgage loan. So, while the mortgage template works, the repayment period is 36 months, and the template doesn't allow me to input that value. So the template doesn't work for me.

Gareth: So just enter 3 into the years field. The template has it as a pop-up menu type, but you can select it, press Delete to clear it out, and then type 3.

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10 Useful Mac Numbers Templates

Comments: 8 Responses to “10 Useful Mac Numbers Templates”

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