Bournemouth — Jun 19th 2018

This meeting started in alfresco style as a group of 12 assembled in the sunshine outside of ‘All Fired Up’, a handwritten notice on the door assuring us that someone was ‘on her way’. For some of us, the assumption that this meant she was headed our way on this particular day at around this time seemed rather optimistic but, happily, it turned out to be well founded.

Furniture re-arranged, projector setup (and refreshment orders placed), 11 of us settled down to hear Mick’s introductory talk on Apple's Numbers.

Numbers has developed over the years and Mick described it now as a worthy competitor to Microsoft’s Excel, with a stronger emphasis on graphical presentation. Mick then gave a Keynote presentation running through the essential features of Numbers such as selecting a new document from the template chooser, adding and removing columns, re-sizing them and changing the format of individual cells or whole rows and columns. The use of multiple tables and sheets was covered, together with formulas and pop-up menus, particularly the SUMIF function, as aids to data analysis.

Finally Mick demonstrated the charting function, emphasising how the chart can be modified and customised.

Questions arising covered the print preview facility (not Numbers’ strongest feature) and the use of historic dates and date-related calculations (where Numbers appears to be quite strong).

The pre-ordered coffee (and/or tea, hot chocolate and cake!) was then served, followed by a Q&A session. This again focussed on the topical issue of GDPR and privacy (just what can Facebook track when you are logged out?). Also Euan drew attention to a couple of useful Safari extensions: DeepL (a translator) and Grammarly (a grammar checker).

Finally a shortcut to the Emoji selector was demonstrated (Cmd-Ctrl-space).

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