Numbers and the Next Big Thing
One subtle difference between the 2D and multidimensional models is that in the latter, the data model is expected to be dense. What this means you don’t really have unused cells; all cells are intended to have meaning in your model. It’s not a freeform grid but a packed model of data. For people used to sticking all sorts of random non-computational stuff into spreadsheets, this can be hard to adjust to. Basically, people are using spreadsheets not so much as computational tables but as a big piece of graph paper.
Numbers shifts this around a bit by making the tables a part of a larger freeform canvas. This is a big improvement from other traditional spreadsheets as I’ve always believed cells are for numbers.
But Numbers is, unfortunately, a traditional 2D spreadsheet. I agree that a consumer-level multidimensional spreadsheet would have been really neat. This is a case where adding dimensions probably makes things simpler.
