Sheets and Templates

You can’t do anything in Numbers without working on a sheet—the blank canvas on which you place Numbers’ raison d’être, tables and their related charts, as well as fancier elements such as graphics and video. This chapter shows you how to create, name, and delete sheets.

You’ll also learn how to manipulate multiple sheets: reorder them, move from one to another, and even move directly to a specific element on a different sheet.

In addition, this chapter shows you how to access Numbers’ document templates when you open the Template Chooser, alter them to meet your needs, and save them as Custom Templates.

Sheet-handling Basics

Numbers’ fairly strict adherence to Mac interface rules makes handling sheets second nature if you’ve been using a Mac for more than a few months.

There are usually several ways to accomplish a sheet-handling task, but many of the most common are available from a tab’s menu. To open the menu, hover your pointer over any tab beneath the Numbers toolbar, and click the menu arrow that appears; or, just Control-click anywhere in a tab.

You can choose menu items from any tab, not just the currently active one; the item applies to the sheet whose menu you’ve used. So, for instance, you can copy or delete any sheet, not just the frontmost one.

The menu also conveniently lists all the tables and charts on a sheet, in order of creation (Figure 3).

Figure 3: A sheet menu starts with a list of objects on the sheet; choose one to jump to it. The Add button at the left of the bar adds a sheet; the arrows at the right scroll the tabs in either direction.

Here’s what you can do from the tab bar and sheet menus:

• Name or rename a sheet: Choose Rename from the sheet menu or double-click anywhere in a tab to select the text for editing.
• Go to a table or chart in a sheet: Choose the item from that sheet’s menu. For the current sheet, use this part of the menu when an item has scrolled off the screen.
• Add a sheet: Choose Insert > Sheet or click the big Add button at the left of the tabs. The width of the tabs doesn’t change when you add many sheets; instead, you’ll get a set of scroll arrows to the right of the tabs that lets you scroll them horizontally, as shown in the previous figure.

  A new sheet always starts with an empty table; the style of the table matches the first one in the set of styles included in the document.

• Duplicate a sheet: Choose Duplicate from the sheet menu. (You can also choose Copy and Paste to duplicate a sheet in the current spreadsheet, but those commands are really meant for working between documents.)
• Go to another sheet: Click its tab. (Alternatively, you can choose a command from the Window menu for the next, previous, first, or last sheet.) Go directly to an element in another sheet by selecting it from that sheet’s menu.
• Scroll through the sheet tabs: Click the arrows at the right of the bar, or, if you’re using a trackpad, use a two-finger swipe when your pointer is anywhere over the bar.
• Reorder sheets: Drag a tab along the tab bar into a new position.
• Cut, copy, or paste a sheet: Use a sheet’s menu to cut or copy it. When you choose Paste, the pasted sheet is inserted to the right of the sheet whose menu you used. Use this option to copy or move a sheet from one document to another. Within a document, use the Duplicate command instead.
• Delete a sheet: Choose Delete from a sheet menu. There’s no confirmation dialog, but if you realize right away that you’ve chosen Delete accidentally, you can reverse the deletion with the standard Undo command (Command-Z).

To Shift or Not to Shift, That Is the Interface

The keyboard equivalents for the Previous and Next Sheet commands in the Window menu are shown as Command-{ and Command-}. It’s not apparent that you must press the Shift key to use them, even though the curly brackets are shifted characters. So, for Show Previous Sheet, press Command-Shift-{; for Show Next Sheet, use Command-Shift-}.

The same is true of the Show First Sheet and Show Last Sheet commands, which need Command-Option-Shift-{ and Command-Option-Shift-}.

Inconsistency alert! The Command-+ shortcut for enlarging text uses a shifted character but doesn’t require the Shift key.

Zooming Around

While sometimes you might want to make an element on a sheet larger or smaller, other times you’ll just want to temporarily enlarge an item for easier viewing or manipulation, or get a bird’s-eye overview of a sheet whose elements don’t all fit in your laptop’s largest window.

To zoom in and out:

• Choose a zoom level from the Zoom menu at the left of the window’s toolbar.
• Choose from the View > Zoom submenu or use one of the keyboard shortcuts listed there.
• Press Command-Shift-comma and Command-Shift-period to jump in 25% intervals. (The keyboard equivalents for the Zoom commands in the View > Zoom submenu are listed as Command-> and Command-<. It’s easy to miss that you must press the Shift key, even though they are the shifted characters on those keys.)
• With a trackpad, pinch in or outward to decrease or increase the zoom level. A smooth (slow-ish) pinch does gradual zooming; a quick one, however jumps at 25% intervals up to 150%, then goes to a 200% view, and thereafter leaps by 100% intervals.

Numbers documents open by default to a 125% view. To change that, go to Numbers > Preferences > General and choose a level from the Default Zoom pop-up menu.

Built-in and Custom Templates

What’s a template? In general, it’s a fill-in-the-blank document that saves you setup and formatting time. In Numbers, it’s a spreadsheet (that’s a document in Numbers parlance), usually with multiple sheets (tabs) in it. One sheet might have a table or two, and some charts, while another sheet could have the same elements for related information. The Net Worth template, for instance, has sheets for Assets and Liabilities with tables and charts, as well as an Overview sheet that shows information from the other two. (And, may I add: it’s pronounced templit, not template?)

Numbers comes with a plethora of superbly crafted templates—for everything from planning retirement savings to tracking students’ grades or a remodeling budget. They are all designed to make you either feel generally inadequate, or realize that only a fortunate combination of number skills and graphic-design talent will ever let you create a decent spreadsheet. (Wait… did I just say that out loud?)

I meant to say: Use Numbers templates when you want to explore what’s possible in a twenty-first century spreadsheet app, learn how certain functions and features can be used, and see what Numbers can do for you beyond the traditional business-centric purposes.

While it’s unlikely that any template will serve your needs exactly, you can tweak a built-in one or create your own. Numbers provides five categories of templates, as you can see in the figure just ahead, stocked with five to ten templates each.

Template Chooser

When you choose File > New, the Template Chooser opens to get you started (Figure 4). Scroll through the window to find a template; click a category at the left to narrow the displayed choices. When you find the template you want, click it and then click Choose or press Return; or, just double-click it. A template opens as a copy named Untitled, so you can’t inadvertently change the original’s name or contents.

Figure 4: The Template Chooser.

Specifying Your Default Template

You can change what happens when you choose File > New so that new documents automatically default to a specific template (such as my favorite, Blank). Go to Numbers > Preferences > General, and for New Documents, select Show Template Chooser or Use Template. With the latter, the template choice defaults to Blank; if you want something else, click Change Template and then select a new default from the pop-up menu.

If you’ve set Numbers’ preferences to use a specific template for new documents, it’s easy to get back to the Template Chooser if you want to use a different template for a new document. Press Option while choosing File > New to change it to New From Template Chooser.

Custom Templates

Once you’ve tweaked a Numbers template to serve your purposes, or designed one from scratch that you’ll want to re-use, you can make a template so you won’t have to tweak, or from-scratch, all over again.

Here’s how to handle your custom templates:

• Save in the Template Chooser: To save a finely crafted spreadsheet as a template for future use, choose File > Save as Template and click Add to Template Chooser. The Template Chooser opens, displaying your template in the My Templates category (which is created on the fly as necessary), with its name selected so you can edit it (Figure 5). The default name is the document’s current name, which is Untitled if you haven’t saved it yet.

Figure 5: Saving a document as a template.

• Save to your drive: Click the Save button in the Save as Template dialog to save the template anywhere on your drive. When you try to open it later, however, it won’t open it as a blank document—you’ll merely see a dialog offering to add it to the Template Chooser. So, why bother? Save a template to your drive when you want to share it with someone later.
• Rename: Control-click its name or thumbnail in the Template Chooser, and choose Rename.
• Edit: You can’t edit a template. Instead, you must open it and edit the document it creates, delete the template from the Template Chooser, and then save the edited document as a new template.
• Delete: Control-click it in the Template Chooser, and choose Delete.
• Organize: You can’t reorder your templates inside the Template Chooser; they remain in the order you added them, with the most recent one first. To shuffle them around, open all of them, delete the templates from the Template Chooser, and then save the open documents as templates in the order you want them to appear.

Note: You can’t rename, rearrange, or delete any of the templates that come with Numbers.