August 09, 2021
Apple Numbers vs Excel: the gaps that still send me back
Updated September 2026: pivot tables arrived in Numbers after this post first went up, so the list below has been rewritten around what is still missing rather than what has since been fixed.
I moved my spreadsheets off Microsoft Excel and on to Apple Numbers because the Mac came with it and Excel did not. Five years later I still open Excel two or three times a month. Not for the big jobs. For three small ones that Numbers either does badly or does not do at all.
This is what actually stops a full switch, written from the position of someone who has tried to make it work rather than someone testing both for a week.
What changed since I first wrote this
My original complaint was that Numbers could not summarise data the way an Excel pivot table does. That is no longer true. Apple added pivot tables to Numbers on Mac, iPad and iPhone, and they now have their own chapter in Apple's Numbers user guide. You select the source table, choose Pivot Table from the toolbar, then drag fields into rows, columns and values.
They are not as fast to build as Excel's, and refreshing behaves differently. But the feature is there, it works, and anyone repeating the old advice that Numbers has no pivot tables is working from a stale article. Mine was one of them, which is why this one says so at the top.
Sort and filter still cost more clicks than they should
Numbers has both. The problem is where they live. In Excel the filter arrows sit on the header row, one click away, and you work inside the sheet. In Numbers you open the Organise panel on the right, add a rule, pick a column, pick a condition, then read the result back in the table.
That is fine for a filter you keep. It is slow for the thing people actually do with filters, which is to try six of them in a row while they work out what the data is telling them. I still catch myself exporting to Excel for that, then bringing the answer back. Bad habit. Real reason.
No paste with transpose
This is the one that has never been fixed and the one I would fix first. In Excel you copy a range, then paste it with rows and columns swapped. In Numbers there is no equivalent paste option.
The workaround is the TRANSPOSE function, which Numbers does have. You select an empty range, enter TRANSPOSE with the source range, and you get a live copy that is flipped. It works. It also leaves you with formulas rather than values, so you then copy the result and paste it back over itself as values if you want plain numbers.
Three steps to do one thing. For a spreadsheet full of data pulled out of a bank statement or a payroll export, where rows and columns almost never arrive the way you need them, those three steps repeat all afternoon.
The toolbar complaint was mine, not the app's
I used to say Numbers would not let you set up the toolbar the way Excel's ribbon works. That was wrong, and it is worth admitting. View, then Customise Toolbar, lets you drag the buttons you want into place and drop the ones you never press.
What Excel has is not a better toolbar. It is a ribbon that surfaces functions you did not know existed, which is a genuinely different thing. Numbers hides its depth behind panels, so you tend to use the twenty features you already know about. If you want to find out what a spreadsheet can do, Excel teaches you more. If you already know, Numbers gets out of the way.
Where the gap is widest
Automation. Excel has macros and Power Query, so a repetitive monthly clean-up can be recorded once and replayed. Numbers has neither. You can drive it from Shortcuts and AppleScript, which covers opening files and exporting them, but not the in-sheet transformations that take the time.
If your spreadsheet work is the same shape every month, that difference will decide it for you and nothing else on this page matters.
File exchange, and the part nobody warns you about
A .numbers file is not a spreadsheet anyone else can open. Send one to a colleague on Windows and it is an unreadable bundle. Numbers exports to .xlsx from File, Export To, Excel, and the export is honest about structure but loses some formatting and any Numbers-only feature you have leaned on.
So if you share files, you are not really choosing Numbers. You are choosing Numbers plus an export step forever. Worth knowing before you migrate a folder of live documents rather than after.
What I would tell someone deciding today
Numbers is the better app for spreadsheets you build, read and keep. Its canvas model, where a sheet holds several small tables instead of one endless grid, matches how most household and small-business documents are actually laid out. Budgets, quotes, stock lists, a running log of repairs. It is genuinely nicer for those.
Excel is still the better app for data you receive. Anything that arrives as an export from someone else's system, in the wrong shape, needing the same clean-up every month, is Excel's job.
I keep both. That is not the tidy answer, and I would rather not need it. But paying for one Microsoft 365 licence to handle a handful of jobs a month has been cheaper for me than fighting the app that came free with the Mac.
If you are weighing up which Apple hardware to run any of this on, my notes on living with the 14-inch MacBook Pro cover the machine side. And if you are moving documents between machines, read what I learnt about Time Machine and off-site backup first, because moving files is the easy half.