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Apple's iWork '09 Numbers spreadsheet is a versatile app with a lot of power available if you open your mind and don't expect it to be Excel. It does not quite do everything Excel does, but it handles UTF-8 well (where Excel does not and has never), and I take advantage of that often. I also love the formatting options and the multiple-sheets-per-document paradigm, but that is a different post.

One challenge in both Excel and Numbers is how to handle fields with numbers with leading zeros. For instance, a part number 001234 will come out as 1234 when you import it from a CSV in either app, and lose meaning if the actual part must include the leading zeros. You can set a cell or column format in Excel as 000000, and this works the same way in Numbers, except the method's a little unfamiliar.

How to Format a Part Number Field to Preserve Leading Zeros

apple iwork numbers zeros text format

Text substitution tools. Personally, I use Text Expander which is quite excellent on the Mac, but LifeHacker recommends ActiveText for Windows. —Rick Cogley

|| From the site: These days, most of us end up having to type at the computer on a daily basis. Some of us are fast and some are slow - but regardless of your typing proficiency, text substitutions can save us all an unbelievable amount of time. The basic idea is to replace a small bit of text with a larger bit of text. So maybe you set 'name' to 'your full name'. Admittedly, this is probably overkill, but it gets the idea across. Apply a small amount of effort and simple text substitution becomes a tool more powerful and dynamic than you might have imagined. Let's see just how much we can streamline your time at the keyboard.

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