iWork Numbers Transpose and a Food Survey

When I switched from using Microsoft Office to iWork last semester, I too was disappointed when I couldn’t find a built-in transpose in Numbers, the spreadsheet program. But then I realized it’s not so bad, if you just use the index function.

For example, here are the food preferences of our household for a sample of foods.

I should do further calculations to figure out which two are the most similar. (=

The transpose cells all contain this:

Not sure why people were writing complicated scripts for that. Maybe it was before the INDEX function?

Anyway, I still love iWork. It’s just so pretty, and it doesn’t hang on stuff randomly like Excel for Mac did (to be fair though, I only had Microsoft Office X, this was before Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, which might be better.) My only complaint - I would like a little more fine-grained control over the graphs/charts features; Apple does a good job making lovely defaults but they ought to let us tweak things a bit more. Hopefully it’s coming. I’ve also seen complaints about it being slow for larger spreadsheets, but I haven’t had any real problems so far. Except for sort. Optimizing that one clearly wasn’t a priority. It’s also missing the formulas views feature which was occasionally useful in Excel (cntrl-`). So I guess that’s 3 complaints. But all fairly minor.

28 Responses to “iWork Numbers Transpose and a Food Survey”

  1. benagarr Says:

    Put this into Freebase NOW!

  2. chel Says:

    I’m shocked that Ben doesn’t like raw broc. Also, I find it interesting that there there are very few foods that anyone scored between 1-4.

  3. misa Says:

    yea, ben likes his broccoli a lot when it’s cooked a bit, but he won’t eat the raw. i noticed the 1-4 thing too — i guess we all just like food. (=

  4. misa Says:

    and we have tried a pellet just to be sure, they’re not tasty at all!

  5. benagarr Says:

    I suppose I could get used to raw broccoli. But I don’t like it right now. Blanched is fine tho.

  6. chel Says:

    Unrelated, but I wanted to tell you one of my favorite things about Minnesota. As you know, we have A LOT of cottontails in this city, even in DT Mpls. Anyway, with the snow cover you can see what they’ve been up to the previous night and the past few days since the last snow — their trails are so cute!

  7. misa Says:

    oooh ooh! can you get a picture? i want to see!

  8. chel Says:

    Yup, we’re supposed to get a new layer of snow tomorrow so it should be perfect!

  9. David Says:

    I just learned about the INDEX function from your post, and saved myself about 2 hours busywork. Thanks.

  10. misa Says:

    yay i’m glad! :)

  11. Tip: How To Use The Index Function To Transpose Data In Numbers | Numbers Templates Says:

    […] I just found this great Numbers tip on Fury&Frost.com: […]

  12. Michael Says:

    Nice tip! I shared it on my Numbers blog today.

    If you’re interested, you can find the post here:

    http://www.numberstemplates.com/2008/05/06/tip-how-to-use-the-index-function-to-transpose-data-in-numbers/

  13. Philip Says:

    Thanks a bunch! I was really struggling with the whole transpose thing (also coming from Excel). This has been a huge help.

  14. Bernie Says:

    Mmmh, just got: syntax error?
    =INDEX(Prefs :: $A$1:$D$6,COLUMN(),ROW())

  15. ??????? ????????? ???? ???? 2009 Says:

    Much interesting, well why all exactly so?

  16. Sandman619 Says:

    To view formulas in iWork 09 ( Numbers 09 )

    GoTo View > Show Formulas List

    Formulas are listed, but do not appear on the worksheet itself, but still helpful

    Cheers !

  17. azbass Says:

    can i used this article to my new blog…tq

  18. thinkmink Says:

    Awesome- works like a charm

  19. seth Says:

    I have no real idea what I’m doing but combining a few ideas from other sites I made this modification which doesn’t put a zero in blank fields.

    =IF(ISBLANK(INDEX(Table 1::$A$1:$F$46,COLUMN(),ROW())),”",(INDEX(Table 1::$A$1:$F$46,COLUMN(),ROW())))

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