Charting in Numbers is rather disappointing...

So, I bought IWork ‘08 the other day and started playing around with it. I was glad to see they fixed a couple of things with IWork ‘06–there was some bug with gradient fills and tables that ended up leaving a thin line of background near the top edge of the cell… but only when you printed or made the PDF.

One thing I was kind of excited about was seeing Apple’s spin on Excel: Numbers. So, being an engineer, I opened up to a blank worksheet, filled column A with 0-360, and column B with SIN(RADIANS(A[X]))–where X is the corresponding row in A, and then created a chart from column B. So this chart has 361 points in it–relatively small considering some that I’ve done in Excel where in upwards of 40,000 points. Well, with 4 processors and 5GB of RAM, Numbers couldn’t be responsive while doing anything with that chart. In fact, I tried tweaking the chart in a couple of ways and ended up crashing the application. Backing the number of points down to ~180 made things work much better. It was a little disappointing. It’s not out of the realm of possibility to want to use 360 or more points in a graph. Anything that involves daily costs, or maybe daily inventories, or… well, you get the idea. I hope the next version takes care of some of these issues. From an engineering perspective, I really need to see more.