As part of Microsoft's 2007 Office suite of products another open XML document type was introduced. This time in the Excel sphere, Excel is known world wide. It is a powerful tool you can use to create and format spreadsheets, graphs, do complex maths and much more. You are able to create diverse spreadsheets with multiple workbooks, formulae, and various data sources. Files can be saved in the XLSX format, which is based on the Open XML format and uses ZIP compression for smaller file sizes.
XLSX improves file and data management and data recovery. XLSX extends what is possible with the binary files of earlier versions. Any application that supports XML can access and work with data in the new file format. The application does not need to be a Microsoft product it can be any application. Users can also use standard transformations to extract or repurpose the data. In addition, security concerns are drastically reduced because the information is stored in XML, which is essentially plain text. Thus, the data can pass through corporate firewalls without hindrance.
Associated programs
Microsoft Excel 2007 OpenOffice OxygenOffice Progessional (Linux)
Files with a .numbers extension are created by Apple's "Numbers" application which forms part of Apple's iWork office suite, a set of applications which run on the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems, and also includes Keynote (for presentations) and Pages (for word processing).
Numbers 1.0 on OS X was first announced on August 7 2007, and the .numbers file contains many of the standard features of a spreadsheet with support for rows, columns, graphs, formulas and charts. The iPad version of Numbers was released in January 2010, and the most recent version of Numbers on OS X is version 3.5 released in November 2014 as part of Apple's iWork '14 update.
As with other products in the iWork suite Numbers includes a variety of layouts designed by professional illustrators and also includes support for importing documents from Microsoft's Office suite (in this case Excel spreadsheets).
The key advances in Numbers are summarised below:
Version
Date
Key features
1.0
August 2007
First version - basic features.
2.0
January 2009
Adds features to allow charts in Keynote and Pages to be automatically updated when changed in Numbers files.
2.1
July 2011
Support added for OS X Lion features such as "full screen", "resume", "auto save" and "versioning".
2.2
July 2012
Includes features for integration with iCloud, retina display support and dictation features.
2.3
December 2012
Includes improved compatibility with Excel documents, the ability to hide and unhide rows and columns amd filters.
3.0
October 2013
Launched with a new UI to match that found in Pages and Keynote, and also includes the ability to create interactive charts.
3.5
October 2014
New OS X Yosemite inspired design, support for iCloud drive, and an updated Numbers file format.
A .numbers file is actually a compressed ZIP file comprised of a number of other different files combined that together make up a .numbers file. The most recent version of Numbers saves files with an "Index" directory containing Apple's proprietary IWA file format, a "Metadata" directory with .plist files and one or more jpg files for allowing quick previews. Similar to Microsoft products, the .numbers file type suffers from a lack of compatibility with other leading spreadsheet programs.
