Read This Before Editing Excel Documents in Apple Numbers

Apple Numbers is a great spreadsheet tool, but it isn’t Excel. These two number-crunchers work very differently, and if you plan on editing Excel spreadsheets in Numbers, you’ll need to watch out for some common issues that might pop up along the way.

Numbers Supports Fewer Formulas, Which Could Break Your Data

As you’d expect from a piece of software that’s nearly 40 years old, Excel has just about every feature you could expect from a spreadsheet editor. Apple Numbers, on the other hand, has far fewer. If you consider functions used to create formulas, Excel has over 450 functions, while Numbers has only half of that at around 250.

With this in mind, if you open up an Excel spreadsheet that you know uses incompatible functions, you might find that the spreadsheet doesn’t show your data as expected. Excel might understand the data, but Numbers can’t. In this scenario, it’s better that you convert the data to values only in Excel first. You’ll lose the functionality, but that way, you won’t lose the data.

Advanced Excel Features Won’t Work in Numbers

Numbers has slowly grown in functionality over the years, but it doesn’t completely match Excel. It isn’t designed to be a fully-functioning Excel replacement, so certain features might just fail to convert over when you’re editing your Excel documents in Numbers.

A good example are pivot tables. Pivot tables are supported in Apple Numbers, but not completely. More advanced functionality, like the ability to create slicers and timelines, isn’t supported—this can break your data. A bigger issue is macros, as Numbers just doesn’t support them, nor does it support Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) scripts.

As with your formulas, you’ll need to make sure that any features that Excel doesn’t support, like advanced pivot tables or macros, are removed or converted before you switch.

Numbers Can’t Handle Big Data Sets Easily

Because Numbers is aimed at home users, it can’t handle big data sets very well. It has a greatly reduced column limit, for example, so you might lose some of your data if you try to open a very large Excel file in Numbers.

There are also problems to face with the sheer size of an Excel document, too. While Excel is a resource hog with larger sheets, it can handle large spreadsheet files effectively. In my experience, Numbers can’t—it’ll slow down much quicker when compared to Excel.

There isn’t a way around this, but it’s worth keeping in mind that these are two very different tools. If you want to edit big Excel files in Numbers, you might encounter poor performance and crashes.

Make Sure You Use the Correct Excel File Format During Saves

By design, Apple uses its own Numbers (.numbers) file format, while Excel uses the XLSX file format, or for earlier spreadsheets, the XLS format. You can open XLSX files in Numbers, but you can’t open Numbers files in Excel. You also can’t save an edited XLSX file that you’ve opened in Numbers back to that format directly, although you can export it.

This is because you aren’t technically “editing” the document in the sense that you can save it immediately. Instead, you’ve imported the data into Numbers, with any missing features or settings removed. If you want to go back to Excel at any point, you’ll need to export this newly imported spreadsheet back into the XLSX format for you to use.

In other words, you aren’t working from a single file here. You’re importing data into a different (Numbers) format, then spitting it back out when you export (to XLSX).

Formatting Won’t Look Right If You Switch

Spent a while configuring your Excel spreadsheet to get it looking just the way you want it? Don’t expect it to look right if you switch to Numbers. Apple’s app does a pretty good job at converting Excel spreadsheets to match what it thinks they should look like, but you’re almost guaranteed to see errors pop up.

One of the most common problems that I see is missing fonts. Office-specific fonts, like Aptos Narrow, don’t work natively in Numbers. I’ve also seen colors matched wrong, images and charts in the wrong places, and conditional formatting rules that aren’t transferred.

Should you switch, you’ll need to look over your spreadsheet carefully and correct any peculiarities with formatting yourself. Don’t trust Numbers to do it for you—it’ll do an okay job, but it won’t spot everything.

Your Spreadsheet Might Not Appear Properly in Excel

Excel and Numbers follow slightly different rules when it comes to the digital paper that you’re editing on. Excel sticks to a firm grid-like structure, but Numbers is far more casual about where you place your content. You can have freer-flowing tables, graphs, and images, creating more attractive documents in the process.

The Numbers approach is great, and that’s why I rate it so highly, but it does leave you at a disadvantage. The more you use this freedom, the less able you are to convert your spreadsheet back to an Excel file without a lot of work. You can’t take the free-flowing tables and text boxes with you, Excel will just slap them in wherever it can.

There isn’t a way around this. If you like Numbers, it’s probably a good idea to stick with it. However, if you need to find a way to use both apps with the same file, you’re going to have to stick with a more Excel-like approach, just to make it easier to convert your file back and forth, too.

Despite the issues I’ve listed above, Excel and Numbers remain mostly compatible with one another. As long as you keep these issues in mind, you should be able to edit your Excel document using Numbers. However, unless you really need to, it’s probably not a good idea to keep switching back and forth—something will end up breaking along the way.

If you decide to go the other way, just remember that you’ll need to convert your Numbers file to Excel first. I’ve not switched completely, but I find myself using Numbers more and more. It’s a great alternative to Excel for basic use, and it creates some very appealing-looking spreadsheets, too.