When I was watching Tuesday's Apple Special Event I was pleased to see that the rumours about a spreadsheet application making its way into iWork were true. I'm a heavy Keynote user - I completely abandoned Powerpoint since I switched to the Mac about two years ago - and I really like its ease of use and the way it's integrated with other applications.

While I was eagerly waiting for the 470MB 30 day trial version of iWork to download onto my Desktop, I read some early reviews on Numbers (which is the name of Apple's new spreadsheet application). They all talk about "the Apple way of doing spreadsheets", and focus on Numbers' great graphical and layout capabilities, easy-to-use interface and Excel import function.

However, I quickly began to fear that the few spreadsheet features that I rely on every day as a scientist were not going to be there. Sure, the software looks and feels great, and I appreciate that Numbers hasn't been designed with a scientist's requirements in mind. I don't use Excel for anything else than data storage, preliminary exploration and data preparation before using dedicated statistical packages to perform the actual analyses. So with just a few extra features Numbers would have managed to entirely replace Excel on my computer...

A few examples should make this clear (screenshots included):