Numbers…Cool Little App
I just got a copy of iWork 08 in the office today and decided to install it during some downtime this afternoon. I had to write a short piece for the paper and thought it’d be fun to do it in Pages.
So, I did. Worked fine, although I was a bit dismayed to find the Word Count (a vital feature for newspaper writing) in the Inspector window instead of in the Status Bar at the bottom of the window.
Otherwise, no complaints.
Then I played with Numbers. I’ve never been much of a spreadsheet guy, although I do use them when I can’t avoid them. (That seems to be more often than not with the Film Society, not with the JFP where most of the financials are done in MYOB AccountEdge. But, I digress.)
What impressed me immediately was the graphical nature of Numbers, which made working with the spreadsheets I needed to create (a very small budget and then a list of our film society’s board members — I was filling out a grant application) fun to do. I got through those two sheets and decided to play with the templates.
While they’re cute and fun, I tired of the built-in Numbers templates quickly. So, I decided that I yearned (yearned!) for others. I found my way to Numbers Templates, a fun little site where people are posting a variety of different templates for Numbers. The programming for these things can get pretty sophisticated and, even more to the point, the sheets created tend to be attractive and fun to work with.
Like FileMaker, Final Cut, and Keynote before it, Numbers may be the “killer implementation” of an app for creative Mac users because it focused on both the mundane and the aesthetic. Suffice to say that I’m going to continue surfing for spreadsheet templates to play with — and that’s not the sort of thing I would have said, er, yesterday.
Crossroads Festival Commerical on YouTube
The 2007 Crossroads Film Festival is over, and a great time was had by all. Here for the sake of posterity is the Crossroads Film Festival TV commercial for this year:
Google Creep
Yes, yes, yes…of course it concerns me that Google is trying to take over the world. But I can’t seem to help it — I keep using Google products. Me, the guy, for political reasons, who has stepped foot only twice in a Wal-Mart over the past eight years — once to return items bought by a project manager I was working with, and another time to buy a microwave pizza for my hotel room in Natchez, MS. That’s it. I understand they have great prices on tires, but I just got a pretty decent price from the guys at the locally-owned Texaco station down the street. (I suppose they have to get their gas from somewhere.)
And, yet, here I am posting documents and spreadsheets to Google Docs. Why? Because of the collaborative features; one of them is an outline for the book I’m working on that the editors back in the home office can check in on so that they can see the lack of progress I’m making toward my deadlines. (I’ve had two good days this weekend, however.) Another is a cash budget spreadsheet we’re using to follow the cash flow of our local film festival, so that the Festival Director, Coordinator, and board members can see what we plan to spend, what we’re spending and what we need to raise. That budget started as an Excel sheet that was mailed to me; in my Gmail account, there’s this handy little link that says “View in Google Spreadsheets.”
I’m weak. I clicked it.
So, yeah, taking over the world, etc. If they just put a dent in Microsoft, though, that would be a start. And I gotta say, the whole “free office applications” thing is mighty tempting to a small business owner…
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