I have used Google Sheets for a while, sharing a Google Drive folder with my spouse. That way we both have access to things like budget and other family related data. I am looking at moving to Apple Numbers. While testing, Apple Numbers seems to get sluggish. I assume it is the size of my table. I have 10,770 rows in my transactions sheet so far.
Just curious for those who use Apple Numbers, what is your experience with large data sets. Do you have tables larger than mine? Any issues? Any issues with it being in a shared iCloud Drive folder?
First, iCloud sync just sometimes… doesn’t. I create documents in Affinity Publisher which I then export to PDF and share with my wife, who is the ‘customer’ for them. Sometimes after I tell her a new document is available she can’t see it, even half an hour after it was created. Usually I can just do something like rename it slightly and rename back again and it will appear. Sometimes, we just gotta wait a lot longer.
Second, Google are using their server expertise to back Google Sheets with some serious power. Apple do not have the same expertise (see previous point). Why do I say serious power? Because when you get 10,000 lines in a spreadsheet, it’s not really a spreadsheet any more but a database living in the wrong format.
I have no personal experience, but I’ve heard good things about Airtable.
Thanks. I know I am pushing the limits of a spreadsheet. The iCloud syncing is a concern. I have also shared simple PDF files with my spouse and have issues with them not appearing.
Re: syncing, as others have said, Apple syncing is unpredictable and inconsistent, regardless of the app. I’ve inquired here and elsewhere a few times after noticing the inconsistencies and I’ve yet to find a good explanation. AFAIK, it has just been in the sync time though, not in the syncing reliability overall. For example, in one instance, my photos will sync across all devices lightning quick, and the next time a similar batch will take hours or occasionally days to fully sync. Why? No one knows. But so far - eventually - everything syncs.
I have no experiece with database-sized spreadsheets though. It’s hard to say where Apple’s odd syncing behavior ends and large file size issues begin (if at all). My shared spreadsheets max in the hundreds of lines with maybe 1 or two approaching 1000, split across multiple sheets / tabs. I don’t remember these having noticable problems syncing in a reasonable amount of time. I do have some monster spreadsheets however, left over from my Excel power user days. Now I’m curious, and I will convert some to Numbers to see what happens.
I did a comparison about 5 years ago between Excel and Numbers and Excel performed far better than Numbers for large spreadsheets. I used a 100,000 row CSV file and attempted to perform addition and multiplication operations on each cell and then plot the results. Excel handled it just fine, but I could never get Numbers to finish the operations, I had to force quit. This was 5 years ago for what it’s worth…
But Apple file formats are unique in the fact that there is virtually no third party support for them. So when I’m finished with a file I always store .Numbers and .Pages documents as .xlsx or docx. Just in case I want to use them with non-Apple solutions.
(I also download a copy of my Google Sheets and Docs in Microsoft formats as a backup)
