I like the feature allowing multiple tables to be in the same spreadsheet. It’s a convenient and obvious solution that, for some reason, Excel or Google Sheets don’t have. Does anybody know the history behind it? Is there any kind of patent around that UI feature that only Numbers (AFAIK) has?
Google Sheets does have this feature. But it was fairly recent. Numbers had it for a long time and in any case I still prefer the implementation in Numbers. In Numbers, data is referenced through these tables exclusively while getting rid of sheet-level references; tables in Google Sheets do not go that far. My mental model for tables in Numbers is just sheets but relocatable and multiple can be viewed at the same time. My mental model for tables in Sheets is just it helps me with formatting and with referencing the entirety of the data like an upgraded named range.
The "tables" feature supported by Google Sheets and Excel is similar, but definitely not the same thing. Tables in those programs just ascribe special meaning to specified ranges of a single shared row:column space (what one would otherwise be tempted to call a "table") that defaults to behaving as effectively infinite.
In Numbers, you have multiple tables that are entirely separate row:column spaces that can be resized and positioned arbitrarily and independently, with small finite extent by default such that they fit on screen. That UI makes the capability to have multiple tables on one sheet more discoverable, and easier to comprehend what it's doing. When you drag and drop a CSV file onto a Numbers sheet, it creates a new table rather than populating cells in an existing table. When you resize column A in one table, it doesn't affect the column A of any other table.
That finite vs seemingly-infinite distinction is a fundamental difference in conceptualizing what a spreadsheet is, which can have pretty far-reaching consequences. I've encountered programs with a "CSV export" feature that generates a CSV file that's more or less what you'd expect to get if you wrote a report in a single Excel sheet, and then exported that to CSV: you get a file that contains tabular data embedded in it, but so polluted with unrelated text and unstructured metadata that having it as CSV format barely helps with parsing and you'd be better off trying to extract data from HTML.
Yeah you can do the same with Microsoft. They have OLE. Apple had OpenDoc in the 1990s for that. It's not a new idea and it's certainly an idea that makes a whole lot of sense.
Yes, it’s different from Excel tables. @wtallis probably explained it better, but I’ll give it another shot:
A “spreadsheet” or tab in Numbers is like a canvas where you can put tables, text boxes, , charts or shapes.
The classic spreadsheet is one of these table objects. If you want it to behave like a classic spreadsheet, you can have a single table object that takes the whole canvas; otherwise, you can have multiple. Each is like a spreadsheet with columns and rows; formulas can refer to cells in other tables.
It’s handy to create dashboard-like views or visually organize your work.
In other words, Excel tables are a special region in your spreadsheet; Numbers tables are individual spreadsheets on a canvas.
You might be remembering the 90s-era MDI user interface where you could have multiple documents open as sub-windows within the parent Excel application window.
