I don’t use pivot tables, but why not use LibreOffice as a free alternative to Microsoft Office?
Okay. I’ll bite. How do you use pivot tables(what kind of data best works for pivot tables) and why is it life changing.
And to stay in the context of this thread, you will of course now also tell us how you have your Excel pivot tables programmed with AppleScript or Keyboard Maestro or Xcode or …
Not that your excitement is not worth sharing or discussing, just not any further here please.
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JJW
I can’t address “life changing”, but for me it enabled using Excel for real (professional?) number-crunching and analysis, which is/was my need. I don’t use Excel for simple tables and lists (which based on observation of XLSX files I get as attachments from various sources is all many people use this expensive/powerful tool for).
To learn about Pivot Tables (only one of the great features of Excel), use your search engine on “what is pivot tables” to see a lot of resources, examples, etc. If not something people need or see value, then fine.
For me, not having them in Numbers stops me from dropping my Office 365 license now, but will in future as my need will get expressed with other methods eventually.
I’d actually love to hear more details on pivot tables and the ways people use them. I’ve never had occasion to use them (I tend to use Numbers for the simple stuff and R for quant. analysis of data). Knowing how they fit into others’ workflows would help me assess whether they’re worth investigating. Thanks.
I gave a moment’s thought to writing something for my blog, but then so much has been written already. Remember, it’s been part of Excel for more than 30 years.
Extremely simple example: (and this a concept that few get taught or have experience with, sadly), is to separate the data from the presentation of data. For example, your checkbook register is the “data” as transactions. “Pivot” the presentation to show Months in columns (across top), and down the rows show “category”, “account” (or whatever), say filtering by year. Throw up a graph of this data presentation with a click or two. Or, with a couple of clicks, remove the filter and show years across top in columns.
So many people build spreadsheets presenting the information as the boss wants, say as described above by month (even with unnecessary blank rows and columns to make “pretty” eschewing Excel’s built-in formatting features!) , and then the work is stuck. If boss wants it by quarter, or by day, or by another grouping in rows … instead of being a few clicks, it’s re-work taking what time it takes.
Edit: Correction: “More than 20 years”, not 30. To this day I recall the conversation with my colleague who first showed me the new feature in Excel, “pivot tables” and how great it was. It was 1995 or so. I had the wrong decade in mind, but the conversation remains solid in my memory.
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ScanSnap Manager (see someone else above)
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nvALT (or its predecessor Notational Velocity) for my personal notes and to save snippets of code or text. Simple and unobtrusive, open file format, no costs, no subscription.
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VMware Fusion: The ability to fire up a Windows or Linux system, create and/or revert snapshots of them - all from the very same one little machine, without rebooting.
I think these three have really changed the way I work and what I do with (and keep on) a computer.
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Coudl you tell for which purposes you use Excel generally? I use to track my habits and my workout plans. Thanks!
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That’s a slick app.
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Yeah, I find it much more convenient than just copying commands from the internet and pasting them into Terminal.
This had to be my favorite tweak though.
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Yeah, that’s definitely pretty cool. 
My favourite discovery from the video has to be ImageOptim. Works like magic on reducing file size of PNGs especially, been using it a lot to optimise the image assets of my iOS app.
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I did that a couple of years back and it really made a huge difference to the app size.
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No I tried that and the developer said to do it to and a few ‘on off’ things. Nothing worked. I still think it might be user error on my part though. Do you have any other suggestions. I would try again I liked the app very much? It is curious and nobody else seems to have that problem and everything else works great for me.
- DEVONthink
- DEVONthink To Go
- DEVONagent
- DEVONsphere Express
- XMenu, EasyFind, PhotoStickies, ThumbsUp
… (for obvious reasons)
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Hazel, DEVONthink, Downcast, Scrivener, and Reeder.
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Very belated answer – but can only agree…
It was a few days into my switching over to the Mac, as a lifer in Windows, when I realised – because of Preview – that I no longer needed Adobe Acrobat Reader – the app (over in Window’s land) that must surely come closest to “I spend more time updating this app, than actually using it”…
That, in and of itself, made me a very happy camper.
But it was when the penny dropped that I could rename a PDF inside Preview whilst it was open, and scrollable, that I realised that everything I thought I knew about PC’s was wrong.
The simple idea that one could edit the properties of a file, while it was open, was mind-blowing…
This from a Window’s user who would frequently be downloading hundreds of PDFs a day, and had to do the “open PDF, check name, close PDF, right-click to ‘rename’, try and remember name, type it in, re-open PDF to check if I remembered it correctly” dance, countless times a day… [This was back when OCR’ed PDF’s off journal databases were the exception, not the norm.]
And that was before I realised that the PDF icon was also a proxy, that could be dragged/dropped elsewhere, to action…
So whilst I wouldn’t quite say it still changes my life, at the time, Preview (and its uses) instantly dissolved all concerns I had about switching from the known, to the unknown.
More importantly however, it had me read-up extensively about what was different on the Mac (since if the ‘mere’ Preview could make this huge a difference, what else was there!?), and was one of the key drivers of my stumbling across the various ‘mac power user’ websites/resources, and eventually, MPU in the iTunes podcast section…
In a way, therefore, Preview started me down the road of a looking at how I could get my Mac to answer my needs, as opposed to what had come before, being a paradigm where I had to fit my needs into what Windows would allow…
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Incidentally, that can be done now on Windows as well - PDF XChange Editor will do it, as will Sumatra PDF
For me, the built in preview using space bar has been great and was one of the big draws to macOS.
In terms of actually changing my life, LaTeX and Texpad were perhaps the biggest ones, as they allowed me to get my PhD and I managed to avoid Word for the duration of my thesis, probably saving my sanity for a short period!
Alfred introduced me to a new way of working (searching and using keyboards as much as possible), and I now get annoyed at how slow using a computer is without this to hand really!
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For me;
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Mac OS 6 (way back in 1987). Actually Mac OS 1 when I saw my first Mac in 1984 - but I didn’t own one until 1987 with System 6. Changed everything I thought I knew about what a computer is.
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Performer (now Digital Performer): First time I could produce music outside the studio environment. I actually gigged with my MacSE and performer on stage
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Way too many to mention through the years, but currently
- Dorico (really great on the iPad as well - for some things, even better on the iPad)
- Reaper - so flexible and light. I love Logic Pro, but Reaper installs on a thumb drive, and runs so quickly - hard to beat it on the go.
- Alfred - first app I install on a new Mac
- 1Password - slowly falling down the list for me, sad to say. Not crazy with some of thier recent decisions. But I still use it because we have such a long history.
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