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C'mon Apple, upgrade Numbers!

iWork '09 was released three years ago today (on January 6, 2009) and it hasn't received a major update since.
Written by Jason D. O'Grady, Contributor

Back in November 2011 I wrote a post titled Where the heck is iWork '12?In it I complained how the last major release of Apple's productivity software suite -- iWork '09 -- has sat idle. Coincidentally iWork '09 was released three years ago today (on January 6, 2009) and it hasn't received a major update since.

I know some iWork customers that are starting to regret their purchase of iWork over, say Office for Mac 2011.

A comment in the Talkback by NoAxToGrind summed things up particularly well:

Apple isn't all that interested in personal computers anymore, they have phones to sell.

Well said.

Today I want to vent about a one particular component of iWork in particular, Numbers. When is Apple going to finally release a upgrade (not an update) to this dinosaur?

Numbers couldn’t handle importing a 6MB CSV file.

Numbers can't import an Excel file with more that 64,000 rows.

Numbers needs function parity with Excel.

Speaking of Excel parity, how about a Format Painter feature for Numbers? This can’t be difficult to add.

And one cannot talk about Excel parity without mentioning pivot tables.

Lastly, Numbers performance is anything but speedy. In fact, it's abysmal. I have a relatively tame no-formula five column table with 6000 rows and changing a value in a single cell requires 20 minutes to update the graph. That’s 20 minutes – not 20 seconds. With all the processing horsepower of a MBP, that's absurd.

Come on Apple. Upgrade Numbers!

In the meantime you can give Apple your thoughts on Numbers and iWork ‘09 here: http://www.apple.com/feedback/

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