Viewing multiple sheets at once in a single Numbers spreadsheet

[jimthing]

@tommy

Key differences would be speed, it flies through a stack of photos, does a better job of scanning photographs at 600dpi and the autocorrect is also good. I’ve the older 500 scansnap so perhaps not a fair comparison, but I never was impressed by it for photographs. The Epson software offers naming and annotation and is fine. Naming and dating takes the most time but I’m sticking with doing that.

My use is towards the scanning of about ten Archive boxes filled with prints, all from a good lab and the quality from the Epson is more than appropriate for the task in hand. I’m planning on a shared Photos Library with my family members. It’ll be months of work and something I’ll throw the odd afternoon at, slowly work away at it.

Fstoppers review has samples of the autocorrect the scanner offers.

Quickly and Easily Archive Photos: We Review the Epson FastFoto FF-680W Scanner | Fstoppers

Thanks for this. Sounds like I might buy (or perhaps borrow!) one of these Epson machines, when I find some time, as ever! ;-)

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@Matt_McCaffrey

This is one of the things I really like about the Numbers approach to spreadsheets. I create all the tables I need on one tab of a spreadsheet, so supporting figures, lookups, and so on are all on the same page rather than having to do three dimensional references. I agree with your recommendation, just a matter of implementation.

I completely agree, putting several spreadsheets on one page rather than having them on separate ‘sheets’ in the same document.

But that raises an interesting question, I’ve never considered…
In Numbers, is it possible to view several sheets from the same spreadsheet doc at the same time?

AFAICT on checking just now, there doesn’t seem to be a way of doing so. Which is annoying, as often you might want to check two (or more) sheets at the same time, to do comparisons and check details are correct.

[trilo]

@jimthing

I completely agree, putting several spreadsheets on one page rather than having them on separate ‘sheets’ in the same document.

But that raises an interesting question, I’ve never considered…
In Numbers, is it possible to view several sheets from the same spreadsheet doc at the same time?

AFAICT on checking just now, there doesn’t seem to be a way of doing so. Which is annoying, as often you might want to check two (or more) sheets at the same time, to do comparisons and check details are correct.

It wouldn’t surprise me if there is a way to do this but I don’t know what it is.

You can copy a table from a separate sheet to another sheet but it remains a copy from that point in time (doesn’t update with changes to the original sheet - not much use really). What I often do is create multiple sheets and then reference relevant cells to a summary sheet.

For example to calculate my tax, I’ll create an income sheet, an expenses sheet, a jobs sheet, shares sheet, rental income sheet etc and then pull the totals onto my summary sheet. The totals are referenced across tables and are updated as each sheet is updated, becoming like a ‘dashboard’ of what I’ve done.

[jimthing]

Yeah there must surely be a way to view 2+ sheets at the same time, by now…or maybe not?

TBH, I’m a little surprised Apple didn’t see this as something people would find very useful.

[Matt_McCaffrey]

@jimthing

But that raises an interesting question, I’ve never considered…
In Numbers, is it possible to view several sheets from the same spreadsheet doc at the same time?

AFAICT on checking just now, there doesn’t seem to be a way of doing so. Which is annoying, as often you might want to check two (or more) sheets at the same time, to do comparisons and check details are correct.

That is an interesting question. My guess is Apple does not think it is necessary, because Numbers is oriented toward multiple discrete tables on the same sheet, which in my mind is like what you’re looking for. If I have two tables on one sheet, and each of them has its own coordinate system that starts at A1, I refer to cells in one table similarly to the Excel method of one table per sheet.

So with that way of thinking, the answer to your question is “Yes.” It’s just a different way of implementing it.

(Example: to calculate my home’s energy use for the solar project we’re doing, I could make lookup tables and various references on different sheets in Excel, and roll up the results on the front sheet. In Numbers, I created different tables all on one sheet, and created a summary table in the upper left hand corner. I can scale things so just that table will print or as I do more often open in Preview as a PDF.)

[jimthing]

I do similar too (one sheet with several tables). But I don’t think that fully answers it, as Apple has built the Numbers app with an obvious option to use separate sheets within one document, which may suit many users in how they need/want to handle the info in certain documents.

So one has to wonder why Apple wouldn’t consider displaying more than one sheet at a time on screen a pretty obvious great user experience that users would want to do, in order to see different aspects of a document when making cross-sheet references and similar.

Maybe they think it wouldn’t be implementable very well on iOS/iPadOS, so macOS doesn’t get it either.

I guess the answer is we will never know, and/or come back in X years when it’s maybe perhaps added, lol!