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excel to numbers

is it hard to bring Excel spreadsheets to numbers?


Posted on Oct 23, 2019 3:39 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 23, 2019 4:09 PM

Hi Robyna123,


You can try it right now.

Open Pages, navigate to your Excel file, open.


There will be some differences. Numbers is not an Excel clone. There can be formatting differences and Excel's array formulas will not work. You may have to trouble shoot formulas, depending on what you have in Excel.


Numbers is set up to work differently also. Where in excel you have a massive table as an entire sheet, in Numbers you have a canvas that can have many smaller tables on it. As you get comfortable you may end up editing your tables to make use of this approach.


quinn

4 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 23, 2019 4:09 PM in response to Robyna123

Hi Robyna123,


You can try it right now.

Open Pages, navigate to your Excel file, open.


There will be some differences. Numbers is not an Excel clone. There can be formatting differences and Excel's array formulas will not work. You may have to trouble shoot formulas, depending on what you have in Excel.


Numbers is set up to work differently also. Where in excel you have a massive table as an entire sheet, in Numbers you have a canvas that can have many smaller tables on it. As you get comfortable you may end up editing your tables to make use of this approach.


quinn

Oct 23, 2019 6:50 PM in response to Robyna123

I would try using Numbers (not Pages) to open the Excel document.


Numbers can open most Excel workbooks and bring in your data. But Numbers only supports a (large) subset of Excel formulas. It flags cells with formulas it did not succeed in importing. You can inspect those marked cells and often replace the formulas with equivalents that will work in Numbers.


The formatting of imported documents can be patchy, sometimes good but often not ideal.


In general importing helps in situations where you don't want to have to build something completely from scratch or where you just want to bring in data. But in situations where you are collaborating with Excel users and need to send documents back and forth you will be much happier using Excel itself.


SG

excel to numbers

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