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Comment by etchalon | Hacker News Reader

Numbers is deeply underrated.

When I was in university I was working on some biology homework and didn't have Excel, but I did have Numbers! I quickly became annoyed with how smart Numbers tried to be with formatting. It knew better than me what data type some cells were and iirc it was impossible to inform it otherwise. I bought Excel after losing an hour or so of my time.

This no longer seems to be the case. I've always found it easy to tell it what format a cell is.

Apple's productivity and utility software generally tends to be my favorite around. It's a big part of what keeps me on the platform.

Safari? Lightest-weight usably-well-supported browser around, by a long shot. Preview? Outstanding for a bunch of reasons, including that using it is the only time I've been happy to receive PDF files. Pages, Numbers, Keynote? More than enough for everything I do, stable, and I like that I can leave them open in the background for weeks and they're light enough that I forget they're there. Notes? Not having a built-in export function is annoying and I wish I could use markdown formatting, but it's so good at everything else that those haven't been enough for me to switch to something else. Hell, I even like the calculator better than most others.

Last time I used it I believe it just crashed when opening a large CSV file.

Also the case for me with Excel on macOS. The Windows version of Excel, on the other hand, has been a lot more performant and stable for me.

Are you using it on Apple Silicon? If so, then Rosetta is the reason why Excel are not performant on macOS. Office365 for macOS are using x86 code at the moment, Office team is rewriting Excel to work on Apple Silicon/ARM. They have a preview build out, I'm not sure when they will release the stable version. I recalled they said it should be release in Spring or Summer.

If you have Excel running, open the Activity Monitor and find the app in the list. Then look at "Kind" column, you will see "Intel" listed. So that's why Office365 are sluggish on it.

Running on a 2.4 Ghz Intel chip with 8 cores. The Excel code on windows got a lot more love than the mac code. Probably due to apple's OS and processor architecture changes over the last 20 years, whereas windows maintained great backwards compatibility the whole time.

The Office apps are now fully recompiled for Apple Silicon

Took me a while why Office is still using Intel code. Turns out they have "Open with Rosetta" enabled. I disabled Rosetta on those apps and it went to use Apple Silicon code. Now it is snappier than using Rosetta.

Thanks for letting me know!

It’s a pig for large spreadsheets on MacOS on either CPU arch.

Numbers is great for lightweight tasks, there just isn't the functional richness of Excel there for more complicated spreadsheets.

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