MacMost: Numbers

When using percentages in Mac Numbers, keep in mind that what you are using are really decimal fractions, and not the whole number shown as a percentage. Use formatting to properly show a value as a percent. Also learn how to use percents for sales tax and other things.

By using formulas, you can show special characters inside your Numbers tables to indicate things like increases or decreases in values, amounts and ranks. These simple techniques can make your tables easier to read and understand at a glance.

By using JavaScript in Automator you can change the value of selected cells in Numbers. But a little more coding you can place specific or random values in the cells, reorder them, insert data from the clipboard or even an Internet location. There are allo sorts of ways to use code like this to do things you couldn't easily do in Numbers otherwise.

Here are a variety of functions, features and tips for Mac Numbers that many Numbers users don't know about.

There is a special Reading Mode in Pages, Numbers and Keynote on the iPhone and iPad that allow you to view your documents without accidentally making changes. Pages also include a Presenter Mode for using your iPad as a teleprompter.

Exporting contacts from the Contacts app to a spreadsheet may seem impossible until you learn one simple trick. You can also export a spreadsheet to a CSV format and import contacts into the app.

Header and Footer rows and columns have special properties in Mac Numbers. They label the cells in the body of a table, and also exclude themselves from calculations. You can scroll and print with better results using headers too.

The latest versions of Numbers make it much easier to sort by last name, even if the data includes only full names. The new functions TEXTBEFORE, TEXTAFTER and COUNTMATCHES allow you to put last name before the first name. You can also use REGEX to do it with an even shorter formula.

Learn how to find duplicate rows in Numbers using various functions and formulas. You can also deal with the duplicates by deleting them or combining the data in them.

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.