Numbers for iPhone

You probably wouldn't think of building a complex, formula-laden spreadsheet on your phone, but with Apple's Numbers for iPhone ($9.99), you actually can. The app not only lets you view and edit existing Microsoft Excel and Apple Numbers spreadsheets, but this member of the mobile iWork suite can create surprisingly rich numeric documents from the ground up. It still, however, lacks the ability of competitors QuickOffice ($14.99, 3.5 stars) and DataViz Documents to Go ($16.99, 4 stars) to sync documents wirelessly to a desktop computer.

Interface
As with Pages for iPhone, Numbers presents just three icons atop your screen?Info, Image, and the Wrench. Unlike the diminutive word processor, however, the spreadsheet app has tabs, and since the narrow width of the screen means you can only see three tabs at a time, you can swipe these sideways with a finger flick. As with Pages, Numbers only displays in portrait view, a bummer since most spreadsheets are landscape-oriented. You can pinch to zoom, but unlike in Pages, I couldn't undo an action by shaking the phone, as the tutorial stated it would. I prefer QuickOffice's undo/redo icon.

Numbers uses a very clever method to add rows or columns: Just tap or drag a handle at the top right or bottom left. DataViz Documents To Go uses more prosaic menus. In Numbers you can move rows and columns by touching the left or top edge near them and dragging to a new location?quite intuitive.

Double-tapping on a cell both zooms into its contents and puts the app in data entry mode. This mode offers four types of entry: numeric (designated by the digits 42), time and date (a clock), text (a T), and formulas (=). Each of these produces a keypad tailored to the data type: Number format has keys for percent and currency, while Date/Time, as expected, offers an hourglass and a calendar, with sub-choices for month, day, year, all the way down to milliseconds. A right-arrow and a return button let me move around the sheet, or I could just tap a cell. DataViz's mobile Excel-wannabe used a more old-fashioned method?you type a number and format it to date, percent, or whatever else after the fact. Numbers gets points for innovation, but some may prefer the tried-and-true, if less direct, method.

Getting Sheets In
As with Pages for iPhone, Numbers limits imports to MobileMe's iDisk, iTunes (which involves USB connection and an eight-step process), and WebDAV. DataViz Documents To Go, on the other hand, lets you load sheets from Google Docs, Box.net, and SugarSync. You start on the Spreadsheets page and hit the Plus sign to either create or import a worksheet. Dragging one sheet on top of another creates a folder, as with iPhone app icons.

There are other limitations, too: When I imported an Excel sheet, a warning page appeared before I could view it in Numbers, saying that password protection, a font, and hidden and merged cells were not retained. And one test sheet's scroll bars wouldn't scroll, though they displayed and I could move them. DavaViz and QuickOffice could both handle hidden ranges, but they ignored protected sheets and displayed unusual fonts with standard iPhone fonts without warning. So, Numbers gets points for honesty, if not for feature support.

Formats and Functions
Functions include advanced engineering, statistics, and financial functions, and tapping the arrow to the right of any of these brings up a thorough explanation of its use and operation. Documents to Go leaves out the engineering functions but does offer database functions not found in Numbers. QuickOffice has neither, but then again, iPhone users are unlikely to need these specialized functions.

You get nine chart types with Numbers for iPhone: four bar types, two area styles, line, pie, and scatter. When adding a chart, helpful messages pop up telling you what you can do. For example, "Double-tap to edit chart references" displayed after I inserted a bar chart, then "Tap or drag on any table to add data to this chart." Though Numbers for iPhone's charting may seem limited compared to desktop spreadsheet apps, its enough to beat QuickOffice and DataViz, neither of which can create charts, though they can view those you created on the desktop. None of the iPhone apps could view a 3D chart created in Excel, but Apple was the only option that attempted to convert it to 2D, with mixed results?in some cases the text labels overlapped the chart.

Sharing
Getting your pocket spreadsheets to collaborators is identical to doing so with Pages for iPhone: Your choices are accessed from the wrench icon, and include emailing an attachment, printing to a Wi-Fi connected printer, sharing via iWork.com beta, sending to iTunes, uploading to iDisk, or copying to your WebDAV server. Of course, with the arrival of iCloud, the iDisk and iWork.com options are subject to change. Getting your worksheet file to a desktop involves a multistep dance with iTunes, whereas QuickOffice and DataViz offer simple Wi-Fi syncing with the desktop.

Numbers May Have Your Number
As with Pages for iPhone, Numbers offers some slick, surprising capabilities for a handheld productivity app. Its nifty table manipulation, advanced formulas, and charting set it ahead of the competitionin some ways. But a few limitations, like missing Wi-Fi syncing with desktops and the lack of support for spreadsheet basics such as hidden cell regions hold it behind DataViz and QuickOffice in some important ways. We can hope this changes in a few months with the advent of iCloud.

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