Despite fewer features and a newer codebase, Numbers has always seemed slower to me than Microsoft Excel. With iWork ’13 backported from iOS to Mac, I expected to see some performance improvements. After all, iOS devices have less RAM and slower processors. In theory, iWork’s new binary file format<\/a> should also be smaller and faster than XML.<\/p>\n Here are some measurements that I made on a 2012 MacBook Pro using a 10.5 MB CSV file, an export of my FogBugz cases:<\/p>\n
| <\/th> | Numbers ’09<\/th> | Numbers ’13<\/th> | Excel 2011<\/th> | OpenOffice 4.0.1<\/th><\/tr>\n |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open CSV File<\/th> | 2m10s<\/td> | 3m25s<\/td> | 2s<\/td> | 10s<\/td><\/tr>\n |
| Save Native File<\/th> | 6s<\/td> | 2s<\/td> | 1s<\/td> | 3s<\/td><\/tr>\n |
| Open Native File<\/th> | 7s<\/td> | 10s<\/td> | 2s<\/td> | 6s<\/td><\/tr>\n |
| Open Numbers ’09 File<\/th> | 7s<\/td> | 16s<\/td> | N\/A<\/td> | N\/A<\/td><\/tr>\n |
| Native File Size<\/th> | 2.6 MB<\/td> | 15.5 MB<\/td> | 3.7 MB<\/td> | 2.2 MB<\/td><\/tr>\n |
| Unzipped Size<\/th> | 62 MB<\/td> | 16.4 MB<\/td> | 22.4 MB<\/td> | 57.4 MB<\/td><\/tr>\n<\/table>\n For opening my file, Numbers was always way<\/em> slower than Excel. The new version of Numbers is even slower.<\/p>\n The new Numbers file format is much faster than the old one at saving, but it’s slower at opening. Excel is much faster than either.<\/p>\n Numbers ’13 takes more than twice as long as Numbers ’09 to read files in the old format.<\/p>\n The old Numbers file format was actually more compact than Excel’s. The new format is nearly 6 times the size of the old format.<\/p>\n On the other hand, the uncompressed Numbers ’13 format is more compact than Excel’s format and much smaller than the old format. Presumably, this allows it to use much less RAM.<\/p>\n Update (2013-10-29): I’ve added results from OpenOffice, a C++\/Java app that uses a compressed XML document format.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Despite fewer features and a newer codebase, Numbers has always seemed slower to me than Microsoft Excel. With iWork ’13 backported from iOS to Mac, I expected to see some performance improvements. After all, iOS devices have less RAM and slower processors. In theory, iWork’s new binary file format should also be smaller and faster […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2019-08-05T20:49:00Z","apple_news_api_id":"dab62eea-b1a9-4660-878e-80152e4b3ca2","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2019-08-05T20:49:02Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/A2rYu6rGpRmCHjoAVLks8og","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1857,471,30,32,609,241,654],"class_list":["post-8088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-csv","tag-iwork","tag-mac","tag-macapp","tag-microsoft-excel","tag-numbers","tag-openoffice"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8088"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26182,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8088\/revisions\/26182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} |