alt Hacker NewsNumbers is fine. Its main innovation is creating multiple tables in a single visible sheet, so that people who want to look at two logically separate things side-by-side have a nice experience and adding a row in one table won’t affect the other.
That said the gist of the article is that don’t use spreadsheets for things that are too complicated. If you restrict yourself to simple things then Numbers is perfectly cromulent with a nicer UI than Excel.
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totally agree that its "fine" - but no one who is serious is doing their data work / anything else in Numbers.
>gist of the article is that don’t use spreadsheets for things that are too complicated.
the OP appears to have never, ever, met a problem where his solution wasn't "make it way more complicated than it needs to be" - go look at the first page of his blog for proof.
Numbers is essential, because it understands dates, better handles CSV files, and doesn't corrupt long numeric UIDs.
But, you're right: Excel is for the complicated stuff. I recommend Numbers to the vast majority of users in our company, who mainly want to organize tabular data, and will never do any calculations with it. The financial folks are welcome to knock themselves out with their Excel wizardry. That separation of concern / purpose works well for both.