iWork '08 tutorials

These tutorials are crap.

I'm working in Numbers, and I can't find a way to fit a trend line (power curve) into a scatter plot of data. I will assume for now that this functionality should be in a basic spread sheet program. Tutorials and help have been useless to this end. Can someone point it out to me?

Cheers.

Completely agree. Numbers certainly shows a new way of thinking about spreadsheets. It's not really a very robust number cruncher (A 700-row table will make it crawl in MBP 2.33) but I like the layout-based design.

(Does the Sort & Filter icon look like a martini? or maybe I had too much martinis)

I've been looking for the Getting Started PDF that's supposed to be on the website - I don't generally like to follow videos. Anyone find it?

Thanks for the 30-day demo link. I couldn't find that anywhere on the Apple website last night.

I've been messing around with Numbers for most of the day . . other than a couple of flaky crashes it's a really strong app. I'm coming to it as a longtime (but never very happy) Windows Excel user (I use it with CrossOver on the Mac).

Excel and friends use a worksheet as a container on which you can stick charts, other objects, etc. This has never been a really satisfactory solution since (face it) most of us don't like to work on a blank piece of paper which has a grid with a lot of numbers on it.

Some oldtimers out there may remember an innovative spreadsheet from 15 years ago called Trapeze. Well, Numbers is the first spreadsheet since then which has used a blank piece of paper as a container for sheet, graphic, text, and other objects. That metaphor alone makes it much easier to manipulate content. For finance people and anyone else who actually needs to format numbers to communicate, Numbers is hugely better than Excel because it is much better for creating communication documents: it's page layout software with spreadsheet containers, rather than a spreadsheet with page layout glued on top (sort of) as in Excel. If you're familiar with other iWork products, the UI is simple and easy to figure out and is typically Appleish - much better (big surprise) than anything Microsoft has thrown at Excel.

For hard core accounting people - I guess some must be Mac users - Numbers may not be the right solution. If you need stuff like PivotTables. you're not gonna get it here. And Numbers isn't a database frontend, it's a spreadsheet. But that's fine.

All in all, this is a very slick app . . .