MacMost: Numbers

Watch as I build a basic business spreadsheet live from scratch. Expenses and income will have their own tables in their own sheets, with a summary sheet that adds up each category. We'll also track items that don't have a category assigned and add a custom filter that will allow this one document to be used for multiple years.

Learn how to sort your tables in Mac Numbers. You can quickly sort by any column, or set up soem complex sort rules and resort by those rules at any time. You can also use Categories to group rows together and sort those Categories in various ways. Sometimes you need to set up special columns for meaningful sorts.

You can track and chart stocks in Numbers on your Mac with the STOCKH function. You can get the close, high and low prices for a stock on different days and then use formulas and filters to build various charts. You can then easily change the stock symbol and dates to generate new charts.

Learn some advanced techniques for measuring time and ranking rows to create filters. Find out how to build a system where you can choose a filter from a pop-up menu customized to your needs.

The cell format in Numbers determines how the value in the cell is displayed. You can set the number of decimal places, add thousands separators, control how negative numbers are displayed and more. You can also format dates and durations. With custom cell formats you can take complete control and even change the format based on the value of the cell.

You don't have to create a document all at once in a single app. You can take different documents from different apps like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, web reports, images and more, and combine them into a single PDF using Preview. This allows you to create pages of your document in the app best suited for that content.

The latest version of Numbers allows you to use regular expressions, also called regex, in formulas. Regex is very powerful if you can master it. You can use them to match patterns in text to perform otherwise difficult or impossible things in your spreadsheets.

You can't lock individual cells in Numbers, but you can lock entire tables. By designing your spreadsheet well, or making alterations to an existing spreadsheet, you can only have exactly the cells you want as editable.

If you need to include something like a + symbol before positive numbers in cells, you can do it using formulas or using custom cell formatting. Using a custom cell format is more versatile and can be easily reused no matter how complex the calculation.

If you want to print or create a PDF with an area of a Mac Numbers spreadsheet you'll find that you can't do it like you can with Microsoft Excel. But there are various strategies you can use to print a selected area in a table or print only specific rows.

Anyone using Numbers should have a good understanding of different cell value types, such as numbers, text, dates, durations and boolean values.

Learn how to create simple bar charts and line graphs from a table of data in Mac Numbers. There are many options to choose from, with all sorts of customiations you can make to the charts.

A good way to learn some basic Numbers skills is to build a simple checkbook. You can use this to keep track of your bank account balance.

A new feature of macOS 10.15.4 and the latest versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote is the ability to collaborate using shared iCloud Drive folders. Once you share a folder, you can create documents in those folders and they are instantly ready for real-time collaboration with no additional steps. This can be used to work on a whole set of files with your team over the course of a project, or permanently.

Not all Numbers spreadsheets need to have complex formulas and perform calculations. Some of the most useful spreadsheets simply help you keep track of members of a group or items you own. Create a simple database like this is easy and can come in handy, especially if you save it to iCloud Drive for mobile access as well.

You can get stock prices in Numnbers on your Mac, but they are only updated daily. But by using Google Sheets you can get live stock prices. These can be used right there, or copied and pasted into a Numbers document.

Numbers is a huge app with tons of features. If you use it a lot, you can benefit from learning some tips, tricks and techniques. Learn how to autofill cells, re-apply sorts, get quick calculation results, automatically format cells, hidden keyboard shortcuts and much more.

If you have a list of names in Numbers it is very difficult to sort by last name unless you have the last name in a separate column. However, you can use a series of formulas to extract the last name and first name, format them properly as Last, First, and then sort them. It will take some extra effort to deal with middle names and initials as well. You can even get rare last names that include spaces to sort properly.

One advantage that Numbers for iPad has over Numbers for Mac is Form mode. If you want to simulate a form in Mac Numbers, you can do it using a few lines of JavaScript code in Script Editor and even make those script available in the menu bar. This could be the starting point for a more complex set of scripts that check values and even allow you to edit row data in a form too.

Creatign pie charts from a set of numbers is easy. But if you have to count occurances in a long list of data and create a pie chart from the results, it can take a second table. However, if you use Categories, you can create it in fewer steps without the need of a second table or any forumlas.