First real work with Numbers
I've spent nearly a year at work building what is essentially a management interface into our defect tracking system. Our defect tracking system is built for Unix engineers; its queries all return lists, and its filter criteria pretty much depend on the user being able to use perl expressions. Plus it has all kinds of interesting data consistency issues. In short, it was missing the ability to look at counts, rates of change, and projections. I built an application that extends the core defect tracking system to add this, and it is being used to help run the next major release of our core operating system.
Lots of engineering teams have their own tools to do similar stuff, and fairly regularly the numbers they get don't match mine. (Of course mine are always right). I spent some time reconciling my tool vs. another tool this weekend, and used numbers to record the results.
If I hadn't read this article, I would have struggled; I'd missed the paradigm shift the author discusses. Once I understood the main difference between how Numbers and Excel work (mainly Numbers having multiple tables per sheet), I was off and running. In general, I think the Numbers paradigm is a significant improvement. I can't count the number of times I've used different cell ranges for small blocks of data in one sheet so that I could look at them simultaneously. In Excel, this always felt like some kind of hack; in Numbers it makes perfect sense.
I did struggle to find things in Numbers I knew should be possible/available. I really miss Excel's behavior for setting background colors/font colors; you can re-use the last color with one click in Excel; in Numbers you have to select the specific color you want each time.
I was worried about how to share the results of the analysis, but the export to PDF worked quite well. I think this product is going to be successful!