Filtered Row Insertion, Sheet Links and Other New Features of Numbers 6.1

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at some of the new features in Numbers 6.1.

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So Numbers version 6.1 has some of the same improvements that Pages and Keynote have just gotten. Those are to have images imbedded inside of text in line. So this image here, for instance, I pasted into this text here and I can move it around like it's a character in the text. Also Text Fill now can have Gradients in them and Advanced Gradients, and Images. You can also do outlines on text. So doing fancy titles is possible now in Numbers as well. Another new feature is when you have a shape, say a circle like this, and you drag an image into it, it's going to center immediately on the face that's found there in the shape. Of course you can adjust it afterwards but at least it's going to jump immediately to the face.

So those things probably marginally useful here in Numbers. More useful in Pages and Keynote but we get them as part of an update to all three apps. Much more useful are the changes specifically for Numbers. So one of those is what happens when you try to enter new rows in a filtered table. So, for instance, you have a table like this where you have products over here and other information about them in the table. Let's say you go to filter this table. So I'm going to go to Organize, Filter and I'm going to add a filter for the product column. I'm going to say that the Text Is and I'm going to set it to apples. Watch what will happen. Of course we only now see the rows that have apples in them. So row 2, 5, 6, 12, 13, 16. 

Now in the past when you do this you can't enter data into the table. In order to enter data you have to turn the filter Off and now you can enter new data and turn it back on to fit the filtered view. But now in Numbers 6.1 you can add a new row. Not only can you add it. It'll assume that the filtered column gets the proper value here. So since we filtered on apples we're going to get apples here. Otherwise this row wouldn't even be visible. So I can continue to enter in apples information here. The next one will do it as well. If I were to switch to another thing for the filter then adding a new row would automatically add that one.

Now another feature is the ability to link inside of the document to a different sheet. So it's important to note that this only works inside of the same document and all you can do is link to a different sheet. So an example of the use for this would be here. I have a column marked Overhead. The formula here is looking something up in a table. It's looking it up in this table which is in sheet 2. So a nice thing to be able to do, especially if I'm thinking years in advance with this sheet, and I want to quickly be able to get to whatever this is linking to, I can select the text here. Go Format and there's Add Link as before. But in addition to webpage and email I can now say Sheet and I can say I want it to link to this particular sheet. So now when I click here it jumps right to this sheet here. So this is a simple example but you can imagine a very complex document with, you know, a whole bunch of different sheets and a whole bunch of different calculations and having these links be very useful to be able to get around and figure out what's happening inside of a spreadsheet.

Now another thing that has changed is the precision of calculations. It's hard to show this, of course, because we're only going to see the current precision. Apple has this document here that explains. You know basically in the previous version you would get a number like this if you subtracted 9.8 from 10.0. But now with the new version it has got greater precision so you actually get 0.2 followed by lots of zeroes. It gives some examples here and explains how binary is used to represent floating point values, like ones with lots of decimal places.

It's great to see Apple working so hard to improve these office apps. We only got version 6.0 at the end of March and in June we got this version 6.1. Last year we got versions 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3 each one adding some new things. I bet we can look forward to some more updates this year and a whole new version coming out pretty much every year like clockwork.