Keynote 14.4, Numbers 14.4, and Pages 14.4

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Originally published at: Keynote 14.4, Numbers 14.4, and Pages 14.4 - TidBITS

Apple has updated its iWork apps to version 14.4, with Numbers getting the biggest boost. The spreadsheet app adds over 30 new advanced functions (including LET, LAMBDA, FILTER, SORT, and UNIQUE), allows you to see results from a single formula across multiple cells using spilling arrays, and improves compatibility when importing or exporting Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

Pages, Keynote, and Numbers all now support using Writing Tools to make text edits directly in your document, presentation, or spreadsheet, receive improved copying and pasting from the Freeform app (requires macOS 15.4 Sequoia or later), and enable you to export documents into other formats using Shortcuts. (Free; Keynote, 383.4 MB, release notes; macOS 14+; Numbers, 272.5 MB, release notes; Pages, 306.2 MB, release notes)

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Numbers 14.4 - It’s Not Opening My Password Protected Documents
Perhaps mine will be an isolated situation, but just to give others a heads up, Numbers 14.4 is causing me issues.

Simply, it’s refusing to open my password protected Numbers documents. The documents themselves are very complex - lots of embedded formulae etc, so I don’t know if the issue is with the password protection, or to do with the complexity of the workbook interacting with the password protection.

One thing I do know is that this is definitely an issue with Numbers, not the password protected workbook.

I know that’s the case as after a few hours of trying to fix the situation, I ended up rolling back my Numbers application to 14.3 (aaah, thank you Carbon Copy Cloner for keeping backups of my apps!!)

So, just a heads up to people who also use password protected Numbers documents - it might be worth keeping a copy of Numbers 14.3 before updating, just in case this is a wider spread issue.

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Did you happen to save a file using Numbers 14.4 and then open it using Numbers 14.3? Once upon a time, a new Numbers version saved files incompatible with older versions. (Since they are both version 14, I wouldn’t expect trouble, but I don’t want to be the test case.)

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OMG, I spent hours trying to transition a set of spreadsheets from Excel to Numbers a couple of months ago and replicated FILTER, SORT, and UNIQUE (plus array spillover) using very complicated functions. I’m very happy that Apple added these - I can simplify these spreadsheets again.

Basically I’ve decided I’m done with paying Microsoft for Office, particularly after they upped the price for AI features that I don’t need or want, so I switched all of my Excel sheets to Numbers going forward. I may have been happier with one of the Open Office apps, just for long-term “just in case” I switch away from Apple OSes to others, but the truth is that I just don’t see myself doing that. And honestly I find that Numbers on iOS/iPadOS is better than Excel files in “M365 CoPilot” (a very bad name IMHO for what used to be Microsoft Office and then Microsoft 365.)

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Hi Will M,

Nope. It’s definitely a Numbers 14.3 version workbook that I was trying to open for the first time with the updated Numbers 14.4.

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Hi Doug,

In my working life I was what you’d call a power Excel user - hooking it into databases, coding functions - albeit in Visual Basic (yuck!) and building complex, but well structured workbooks. (Former Actuary so guilty of all that profession’s usage of spreadsheets!)

When I retired I took a closer look at Numbers, assuming that it’d be a very lightweight product by comparison.

How wrong I was!

In my personal opinion, it’s an elegant piece of software that’s very, very capable. I love the way you can reference cells or anything else with what looks like an object oriented approach.

Forget your cell referencing days from Excel, or the more elegant named ranges, instead you’ve got referencing like the following:
Sheet::Table::Row::Column.

And being freed up from thinking of a sheet as simply rows and columns that you have to drop things into. Instead to me a Numbers sheet is an object into which I can drop tables (with the traditional Excel style formulae), graphs, pictures, you name it.

And all of these items can be referenced with a schema like the above.

Anyway, as an ex Excel power user, I find Numbers a delight to work with, with very few weaknesses compared to Excel and many areas that I love much more.

Just a few other highlights worth knowing:

  • If you’ve got a complex Excel workbook and want to refactor it in Numbers, then Numbers generally does an excellent job of converting the former to the latter. It does a pretty good job at converting complex formulae, showing you the Numbers equivalent ways of doing things.
  • You can format your equations!!! While it’s sensible to minimise the complexity of your calculation formulae, in Numbers you can force line breaks into the formulae to make them much more readable.

So you can use new lines to separate out multiple lines of logic useful if you want to separate out

  • if…
  • then…
    type logic!

Anyway I’ll stop there as I really like Numbers and unless you’re doing edge case stuff like I used to in my professional life, Numbers can do everything that Excel can and usually in a more elegant way (yes, I’m aware that Excel now helps with data analytics, but really, Excel is NOT the place to do that sort of work!!!)

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Dan More is a fan of the new Numbers:

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And more

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An Update - Numbers 14.4 May Refactor Your Formulae Leading To Long (Initial) Opening Times
In case this is of use to anyone else, I’ve got to the bottom of what the issue was with Numbers v14.4 - and it may be of relevance to others.

OK, why did I think originally that Numbers v14.4 might have a bug, not being able to open my password protected Numbers (v14.3) workbook?

Well, when I upgraded to 14.4 and tried to open the workbook, Numbers would just sit there, seemingly doing nothing.

Aaah, but I was wrong!!!

The particular workbook is the most important one I keep, containing lots of personal financial calculations and projections.

As workbooks go it’s pretty big - 130+ sheets containing lots of pretty complex, interlinked financial calculations (ex. Actuary so hopefully you’ll cut me some slack here :wink:)

And as it’s core to my financial management then I’ve spent the time looking at why Numbers v14.4 wasn’t working with it and wouldn’t open it, as I can’t move to v14.4 if it won’t work with this particular workbook.

And the answer?

It turns out that Numbers v14.4 rewrites some of your formulae, refactoring to it’s new way of working.

It doesn’t tell you it’s doing this - no helpful message boxes telling you that it’s doing something, rather than simply hanging there.

But working away it is.

After leaving my very capable M2 Mac Studio to sit there trying to open the workbook, to my delight, it did open it. Taking approximately 17 minutes to do so. And when it did finally open the workbook, it displayed the message below.

CleanShot 2025-04-11 at 17.13.25@2x
CleanShot 2025-04-11 at 17.13.25@2x1156Ă—616 36.7 KB

So there you go. A heads-up that if you’ve got lots of formulae written in v14.3, it may take Numbers v14.4 time to open the workbook and convert the formulae over.

And has Numbers converted the formulae correctly?

By that I mean the calculation results should still be the same regardless as to how the formulae are rewritten.

At the moment I haven’t had a chance to check that. I really hope so as it’ll be a headache if it hasn’t. Should make for a fun weekend checking it out.

But the key thing I wanted others to be aware of is that Numbers v14.4 may take a long time to open your workbooks if they contain a lot of formulae!

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My spreadsheets are not anywhere near as large, so they all opened pretty quickly. And I did get the formula change message, yes.

I spent yesterday simplifying my main daily spreadsheet (which I use to track my workouts / exercise data and shoes that I use, etc. - six sheets and about 10 tables with various analysis) with the new unique, filter, and sort functions (which I used on excel before) and eliminated about 12 columns used to try to kludge those functions in the last version of Numbers.

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Did it save a backup copy or offer to have one created for you? If not, I actually find that to be quite horrifying.

It’s one thing to add new features to software, but it’s an entirely different thing to rewrite the content of a potentially sensitive document without permission.

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No it didn’t.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that Numbers had rewritten my workbook, just the implementation of formulae in cells.

To be fair to Apple, it’s not unusual for software companies to change (hopefully improve!) how functions are coded.

What I saw was just a very visible example of that.

Your point about backups hadn’t occurred to me. If Numbers has completely messed up my calculations - and hopefully it hasn’t! - then my onsite and online backups will hopefully have me covered.

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Thanks for the follow-up. Have you saved the updated workbook in Numbers 14.4 and then opened it using Numbers 14.3?

If it does open in 14.3, and then you save it in 14.3, does it take a long time to open again in 14.4?

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My pleasure.

Interesting questions! Right, having checked:

What happens when you update the workbook in 14.4 and then try and open it in 14.3?

Works fine.

Opening the workbook in 14.3 worked, so the changes are clearly backward compatible. There were however subtle indications in 14.3 that the original formulae had been changed.

For example, in my asset balances calculations I use the following named range formulae in columns (sorry, I know that doesn’t make a huge amount of sense when written, but bear with me), as follows:

Number Held * Price

Re-opening the workbook in 14.3 after 14.4 had updated the formulae, these formulae now looked like the following:

(Number Held) * (Price)

If it does open in 14.3, and then you save it in 14.3, does it take a long time to open again in 14.4?

No. It looks like the changes are a 1-time operation. The workbook now opens as quickly as it ever did in 14.4, even if I open it in 14.3 and make some edits there.

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