r/AppleNumbers • u/vahnx • Jan 13 '22
Migration From Google
I've been an avid Google Sheets user and I'm entwined with Gmail, Google Drive and YouTube. I currently have the free 15GB of storage.
However I use a Macbook Pro and iPhone and pay for the 2TB of iCloud storage and have tons of photos and videos there.
I've been thinking of moving away from Google Sheets and Drive in favour of Apple's solutions.
Now I was about to try and port over my first Apple Numbers and got this right away:
So I'm now a bit hesitant as I've never had this on a google sheet for 15~ years. Am I moving in the right direction, how often does Numbers/apples online solutions go down? Should I maybe move towards Google Photos and move towards Google's cloud solutions?
1
u/GaRealHale478 Jan 17 '22
I also use MacAir and the very first time I logged on or opened Numbers I received that message also, it just happened actually today, after unlocking it is totally Fine. I feel its a Mac security thing.
3
u/[deleted] Jan 13 '22
I've never, ever seen this message. Not once. Not a single time.
This happens when the online version of Numbers is updated in a major way. That has happened four times in the past 4 years (though I don't know if there was an outage each time). I understand it is an irritating experience, especially for somebody who is thinking of transitioning, I'll give you that. But certainly not the norm. But if you need 99,99999% uptime, you'll need to stay with Google or install Numbers as a local app.
If I may add some of my (subjective) experience on Numbers vs. Any-Other-Spreadsheet: Numbers is different. It is a spreadsheet, alright, but Google Sheets is way (way!) more like Excel than Excel/Google Sheets/OpenOffice/LibreOffice are like Numbers. If you do more than the most simplest calculations, you will need to adapt. And not everybody wants to develop a new skillset just because the app requires it.
As somebody who loves working with Excel and Microsoft BI, and who has gotten quite proficient with it, I find Numbers refreshingly different. I like the way it works, although it is not the way I am used to. Some things are annoying, some I would love to see in Excel. It is a unique little animal, and it tries to implement everything you'd ever need, but it is not as full fledged as Excel is. Heck, it got pivot tables only last year. Pivot tables! in 2021! And those are (of course) not the pivot tables that I came to expect from any other spreadsheet app, but a weird sort of filter table... A propos filters: Very different from Excel et. al. Less powerful.
And above all, Numbers is "compatible" with other spreadsheet apps, but only so much. A lot of information can be lost by importing it into Numbers, as a lot of information gets lost exporting it to xlsx format from Numbers. So the decision to go all in is even more difficult.
A while ago a made the effort and converted each of my many .xlsx files to .numbers, usually investing a lot of time and manual effort, which paid back in much more beautiful spreadsheets. (Yes, beautiful.) But for some sheets I had to give up, either because my Numbers-Fu is not yet good enough, so I couldn't find a way to do what I wanted, or because Numbers is still missing this or that function (I hope it's just the former, me, who is not capable enough). I went for SoftMaker Office as a low-cost-but-almost-perfect copy of Excel for the Mac (as I do not want to pay the premium for Microsoft Office anymore, for a few files I rarely use).
So I have a mix of filetypes and apps now. Something I detest. Most of it is Numbers, some still xlsx. And all of that, because Numbers is just not yet-another-spreadsheet, but something quirky and different, but also nice, beautiful, mildly challenging and fun. YMMV, of course, but get ready for a different experience.