Kevin C. Wong

Apple Numbers v14.4 (2025) [+]

Besides Apple Notes, Apple Numbers is the productivity app I use the most because I use it to keep of game data as I play a game. Apple Numbers is a fairly standard spreadsheet app. A document has one or more sheets (each is a tab) and a sheet can have one or more tables. I sometimes add text areas for more notes-style data though text areas are nowhere near as good as a text editor.

Most of my Numbers documents go into an iCloud folder so I can access them anywhere. On an iPad not too bad and here you have the concept of View and Edit modes which I guess is nice if you don't want to accidentally send updates if you're only viewing. iPhone is the same experience albeit a very small screen. Whole document syncs and my documents are several hundred KB (no graphics) so more chance of sync conflicts than with Notes (then again I don't know if Notes stores everything in one file or multiple files).

Some Numbers docs I have:

  • DDO Characters - with one sheet per character showing equipment and equipment stats
  • DDO Characters Archive - old characters otherwise the previous doc has too many tabs
  • DDO Items - track of named magic items so when your party finds a new one I know if I want it or already have it
  • DDO Templates - character leveling guide for my frequently used classes (feats, skills, enhancements the last being most important), useful since in D&D building up/synergizing various bonuses can be important
  • Electricity Usage - mostly was doing this to see if heating system was using a lot of electricity (it was)
  • Game Store Games - keep track of Epic/GOG/Steam/Mac App Store games I own otherwise it's easy to buy the same title in multiple stores
  • Investments - keep track of my retirement investments
  • Misc Game Notes - for smaller games, though rarely used nowadays
  • Star Trek Fleet Command - there's lots of stuff to keep track there and I have 10 sheets of info
  • Car - maintenance service history for my car
  • Viewer Infractions - for keeping track of Discord/YouTube infractions as they don't have good history like Twitch

As you can see I use Numbers for a lot of data tracking. Better than Notes for tabular data and with a table you can sort in different ways or do formulas to add up a column.

I don't recall having any problems with Numbers other than syncing issues. I guess one tip I have is if you open up Numbers on iPad or iOS and it's already in a document immediately close it then open it to force a sync. Otherwise you might be working with an old version and then when it syncs bad things happen. My habit is to close the document going back to browse documents screen when I'm done on iPad/iOS.