Education

Everything you could want in a spreadsheet

Numbers, the newest addition to iWork ’08, gives students and teachers an easy-to-use set of tools for organizing, calculating, and analyzing data. For example, students can produce lab reports with graphs of their data and photos of their experiments, and teachers can create spreadsheets to track classroom expenses.

To start, students can choose a blank sheet, a grid with empty rows and columns, or open a preformatted template — one they can quickly customize and populate with graphs, tables, and charts. Calculations are made by simply dragging more than 150 built-in formulas to cells or by using common phrases like “total cost.”

A spreadsheet and much more

Numbers offers many options for working with data. Students can use the Function button to enter formulas to make rapid calculations. With the filtering tools, they can display only data that meets certain criteria. And interactive controls such as sliders and checkboxes can be added that let them play “what-if” in real time. And students can create a chart or graph of their data with a single click.

Numbers offers students a flexible media-rich canvas that they can use to organize their data in a variety of ways. With the Media Browser, they can easily add images, movies, and sounds to their spreadsheets. And they can quickly move elements on a sheet, resize a table, or move a table from one sheet to another, all without affecting their data.