This is the first in a series on some of the more advanced functionality of Numbers, my favorite spreadsheet app. If you’re new to spreadsheets, or just want to make them look a little less like Microsoft Excel, this article should be right up your alley. In this article, we’ll talk about conditional formatting.

What is conditional formatting?

The real power behind spreadsheets is not just how well they can crunch data, but how you can visually present the information in a variety of ways. Sometimes, however, you may want to give more attention to a particular area, or hide certain data if it’s not relevant. You often see conditional formatting applied to financial spreadsheets where positive values are in black or green, but negative values are always in “the red.” So how do you do that? It’s where conditional formatting, or formatting based on certain criteria, comes into play.

Here’s a quick example. Let’s say I have something that shows you my net worth for each month of the year. (These numbers are entirely made up, for demonstration purposes.) Assuming that these numbers were coming from a different spreadsheet, I could likely have one of three possible values for each month. If I were doing well, the value would be a positive number. If I were feeling the toils on the economy and not so great at managing money, the value might be negative. The last option would be if we haven’t gotten to a particular month yet, for example, in September 2009 the value reads “$0” as no data yet exists to calculate that value.

Net Worth without Conditional Formatting

Applying some formatting

Based on this example, you can see that before I begin to do any formatting, I have a mix of positive values, negative values, and some that read “$0” because we haven’t yet entered data for those months. To apply formatting, I would select the first cell next to January.

In the Inspector under the Cells tab, you’ll see an area that is labeled “Conditional Format” with zero rules applied. If I click “show rules” I will get a new window that allows me to start stacking on a series of rules that I want to compare this cell against.

For this example, I’m going to pick “Choose a rule” and select “Greater than.” If I enter “0” as my value, I’m telling Numbers that I want to apply special formatting to any value that is greater than zero. This would be where my net worth was in the positive numbers. If I click the “edit” button, I can now start layering on formatting. To keep things simple, I’m just going to change the text color to green and press “done.” You do have options here for a variety of other formatting choices, including bold or italics and changing the cell background. Looking back at your document, you should see that the value has now turned green!

Now I’m going to apply another rule, this time to address negative net worth. This rule is going to be “less than 0” and I am going to format the text to be a red color with bold styling.

Finally, I am going to apply one last rule, which will address the “0” values for upcoming months. Usually, you will not see a net worth perfectly at “0,” so I have used this assumption to keep our “0” values open for this next example. If a value is “0,” we’re assuming its because we are at a month in which nothing has happened yet, so we will simply want to “hide” this value until an actual value (positive or negative) can take its place. To solve this, we’re going to format the cell to take values that are “0” and turn the text white, so it will simply blend in with our background and therefore be hidden.

One down. A few to go.

Once we are finished here, we can close this window and go back to our spreadsheet. Now we’ve laid out the set of conditional formatting rules, but they currently only apply to the net worth listed in January. The next step most would take is to simply grab the little dot on the right of the cell and drag down to “fill” down, but do not do this. You will inadvertently fill down the value of that cell and not its formatting.

Net Worth with Conditional Formatting Applied

The last trick up my sleeve is how to copy formatting between cells and that is to use a feature called “Copy Style.” This is similar to the “Format Painter” of Microsoft Excel. Simply highlight the cell we were working on, go to the Format menu and select “Copy Style.” You can then highlight the remaining cells, go back to the Format menu and select “Paste Style” and you should end up with something that looks like the image to the right.

The Copy/Paste Style is a very useful tool and is found in all of the iWork applications. There is even a quick button to access it that you can add to your toolbar (open the View menu and then click “Customize Toolbar”).

If you are familiar with Conditional Formatting from Excel, nothing has really changed except the limit to the number of rules you can apply. Microsoft Excel previously limited users to applying three rules to a cell (usually that was more than enough) and, as far as I’ve found, Numbers imposes no limit. In the next article, we’re going to dig a little deeper into the power of Numbers with how to do horizontal and vertical lookups. If you have any Numbers-specific topics you would like me to cover, please use the comments below and let’s get the discussion started!

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Welcome To Aqua

The first noticeable item is how quickly OpenOffice 3.0 beta loads, even when compared with Microsoft Office 2008. In less than five seconds you are at the welcome screen ready to create your next masterpiece. Where the X11 interface felt choppy and looked…like an X11 interface, OO 3.0 definitely looks and feels like a fully integrated Aqua application, with menus being very responsive and keyboard shortcuts working (mostly – hey, it’s beta) as expected. How does each behave in this newly integrated world? Let’s take a look.

Writer

Whether it be your latest manuscript, research paper or basic flyer Writer definitely has the tools you need to get the job done. Complex header/footer arrangements, full table of contents manipulation, floating frames and more make this a very sophisticated word & document processor.

I do a great deal of legal document markup and the new notes feature keeps OO 3.0 on track with Pages and Word:

I also especially liked the font preview option for the font menu:

The multi-page layout view mode makes it very easy to see if the visual flow of your document is to your liking:

And, it was refreshing to see a “preview” mode that wasn’t just a export-view to Preview.app:

However, this is also where my first beta bug reared its ugly head with a half-dup of the menubar:

Writer also has basic support for VBA macros, something which neither Pages nor Word 2008 can claim and a feature which came in extremely handy this past weekend for a document I absolutely needed to work with (I could have VMware’d or Boot Camp’d into XP, but OO 3.0 made it so I didn’t have to). That same document also had many form-fields which all worked flawlessly in Writer.

When saving my document, doing so in Microsoft Office compatibility mode produced documents that worked flawlessly on Word 2008 and Word 2003/2007 (on Windows). Importing Microsoft’s new XML-format documents also worked well, though mine aren’t complex by any stretch of the imagination.

Writer is a fine tool, but there are still multi-platform quirks, like the button rendering in some dialogs:

and a less-than Mac-like preferences system:

Calc

I’ll state up-front that I hate spreadsheets. I hate them mostly due to the fact that people use spreadsheet programs as page-layout tools rather then as number crunchers. Numbers understood this and makes no attempt to hide that it is first-and-foremost a way to make pretty, numerical pages. But, getting back to the topic at hand…

Calc is a clear mimic of Excel 2003 for Windows, complete with charting and “solving” capabilities (which the developers are quick to point out do not exist in Excel 2008). Not being a non-work spreadsheet geek (and, I can’t use work examples) I Googled for filetype:xls and pulled a pseudo-random document to work with (the one pictured above). You can see what that Excel document looks like in Excel 2008 just for comparison:

The formatting is pretty much identical and, as a result, I decided to extend my test by checking out Calc’s new charting capabilities:

and then saving in compatibility mode and re-opening in Excel 2008:

I was truly impressed by just how well the two programs worked together, making me a bit more confident if I ever have to use OO 3.0 to edit/share docs with others. I did not have an opportunity to test the new collaboration (i.e. track/merge) feature.

Impress & Draw

With Keynote I have little need for alternate presentation software, but Impress worked as well as previous versions and I did create and preview a quick presentation with no issues:

Similarly, while I have no real need for Draw, it was trivial to create basic line-art documents with this tool:

Database

While it may not have a catchy name like FileMaker (although one could argue that is equally as utilitarian a name) or Bento (I promised myself I would not take this review as an opportunity to trash Bento), OO 3.0′s “Database” application fills a void that exists in Microsoft Office on the Mac and that has been missing in general from the open source world.

The built-in field sets and templates in Database made it trivial to setup a quick recipe database with entry form. And, best of all, I just used the defaults. If I wanted to make it more attractive, I could have spent as much time as necessary crafting primary keys, adjusting field sizes, adding font labels and customizing each feature of the forms. It may be worth it just to keep OpenOffice.org 3.0 around just for the Database program.

The true power of Database comes with full integration into the OO 3.0 suite. I can use the recipe database (if I populate it) to have Writer make a nice recipe file (Database reports could do this as well). Database also allows for data export as well, so you are definitely not locked into the program.

Odds & Ends

Some features spread across the individual components and others were just noteworthy or interesting. For example, when comparing the PDF export feature in Calc, it wound up creating a smaller file than the OS X “print to PDF” option and created table of contents labels based on the spreadsheet tab names.

OO 3.0 also provides a decent number of templates to choose from when starting a new document, some of which aren’t obvious from the flashy “welcome” dialog or just casual interaction with the program (like the full XML document editor).

The help system is very robust and can assist you in pinpointing where to find the functionality you just know is there (like how to mimic Word’s “different first page” feature).

OO 3.0 provides no AppleScript dictionary, so scripters are once again relegated to GUI scripting and the UI – while integrated well with Aqua and with decent Universal Access support – is definitely showing its age. The beta outright crashed on me several times as well, but it confirmed the rock solid document recovery capabilities of the program.

I can say, honestly, that the final version of the software will take its rightful place in my Applications folder, if only to have the ability to deal with the occasional VBA-based document that comes my way and to make use of the Database program.

If you’ve tried OO 3.0 beta or are one of the developers for it, drop a note in the comments with your take on the software and any tips or advice on using the various components. Remember to submit bug reports if you do test the beta and find some quirks. You can also grab a slew of test cases which will cover more of the functionality than I have in this post.

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