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Apple's Numbers spreadsheet is not Microsoft Excel. To be frank, it's not as good as Excel but that's not why we say it: Numbers is a first-class application, but people tend to think of it as an Excel clone - and that misses the point a little. Instead, Numbers is a different approach to solving the same problems and giving the same tools as Excel. You'll get more from it if you don't think of how Excel would do something. You'll also get more from it by using the many little touches that Numbers has but, in typical Apple fashion, are not forced down your throat. Here are five of our favourites, five where we've found or been shown something and wondered how we ever managed without it.

Five that we have since used pretty much every time we've opened up Numbers. This was tested on the latest Numbers 3.6 running on OS X El Capitan but all five have worked for many years. Merging stubborn cells We just had this the other day: we wanted to have one very long cell atop the regular rows of them. It was so that we could include some text to remind us of what the next section of the sheet was about. You do it by merging several cells together but we couldn't do it: the option was greyed out. The reason is that we were trying to merge all the cells in a row - and that therefore included the cell in Column A.

The header column. When we tried again by selection only Rows B to the end, now we could use Merge Cells. (You'll find Merge Cells under the Table menu.) Quicker text editing Notice how we haven't even got to numbers and digits yet, we're still on text.

We use Numbers a lot for text: obviously for labelling months and days in some financial sheets but also for listing articles and holding weblink. Constantly we are wanting to change or amend some text so we have to take our hands off the keyboard and double click on a cell, then click to position the cursor and the end, then use the arrow keys to get back along to whatever we want to change.

Just hold down the Alt key and click exactly in the cell where you want to do something. This may be the shortest of our five favorites but it's a favorite for the reason that we use this, no exaggeration, seventeen billion times a minute.

Separate tables This is where you really know that you are not in Excel. Just take a look at the image here: this is one spreadsheet but done in Numbers instead of in Microsoft's application. With Excel we could just pretend that these next few rows are to do with this point but really what we tend to do is separate out our work into different tabs within the spreadsheet. So at any one time we usually only see one large spreadsheet. In numbers you can create entirely separate mini-spreadsheets and spread them around. That's not a figure of speech: you can drag the tables anywhere on your screen.

Click in the circle icon at top left of the table and drag. You may now be looking at your screen wondering where this icon is: it doesn't appear until you click somewhere in the spreadsheet table first. That makes the table active, that makes many icons appear. When you click on that icon, you also get handle bars around the entire table and if you click and drag on any of those instead, you resize the entire table. It's resizing as in making each row, column and cell smaller: to resize as in add or remove extra rows and columns, click and drag on the circle icons in the other three corners.

The bottom two - one on the left looks like an equals sign and one on the right is like a reverse L - will always add extra rows. The L should add columns if you drag to the right instead of down but we find that inconsistent. Similarly, the circle icon at top right, which looks like an equals sign on its side, is sometimes oddly tough to tug at to get extra rows. Still, it is the way to do it and it does play ball in the end. Cell formats This bothers us much more on the iPad version of Numbers - which is otherwise an excellent app - but in both versions you regularly get Apple trying to help you in ways you don't want.

Numbers Five For Mac Formulas

Cells have formats and initially you don't truly need to know that. Just type in a date and it'll be a date. Type in a number, it'll be a number. The reason for there being a format is so that Numbers knows this is a date, knows this is a number, knows this cell has only text in it. You can't add up text cells the way you can ones with numbers in.

As we say, we do a lot of spreadsheets with text but unfortunately very often that text is a number. It's digits but it's really an invoice title, for instance: we're never going to add up all the invoice numbers and get an average, we are only ever going to search or read the number as it is. Unfortunately plus, the sequel, some of our numbers begin with a 0. Try typing a number that begins with a 0: Numbers will just pretend it didn't hear you. So entering '012345' becomes '12345' when you hit return. To keep that 0 at the start, you need to make the cell be formatted as text. You can do one cell, a range of them or entire columns: we'd recommend entire columns as then you'll always know anything you put there will be text.

You won't ever find that the important leading 0 has vanished and you didn't notice in time. So click once in any cell in the row you want. That brings up the table icons and you can now click on the row 1,2, 3 or column letter A, B, C that you want.

When you've clicked that, the entire row or column gets highlighted. Now click on the Format icon at top right of the window. Choose Cell and at the very top there is Data Format. It will be set to Automatic. Change it to Text and you're done. Speaking of headers We still think in Excel terms even after all this time.

One way we do that is in that we forget Numbers lets you have many headers. Instead of just the top row being treated as special so that you put labels like month names in there and Numbers or Excel know not to sort them in with the rest of your spreadsheet numbers, you can set other special rows.

Other special headers. While we do tend to use different tables more than separate out sections within one, we have found it useful to say that row 1 and row 20 are header rows. It lets us sort and format sections, it lets us freeze headers so that we scroll through all the numbers without losing sight of what they're supposed to be. To create a new header row, click on the spreadsheet table to bring up the icons, then click on 1: the number next to your existing header row. When that highlights blue, there is a tiny drop down icon: you may have to also move your cursor to the edge of the 1. Click on the drop down and you now have options to Add Header Row.

Choose Add Header Row After and it's done. You now have two header rows, one after another - and you can drag the second one to anywhere you want in the spreadsheet.William Gallagher.