Dorchester — Aug 14th 2018

Mick took us through the basics in Numbers using a spreadsheet showing transactions on a hypothetical bank account — he advises against that use for real! In addition to columns for the date, description, credit and debit entries he set up a column for the running balance, showing how to make the formula for the calculation and how this can quickly be copied down the column. Numbers is clearly very user friendly; for example when creating a formula the relevant cells are coloured to distinguish between columns and where possible the column and row descriptions are included in the formula. Following industry standards, Numbers uses the dollar sign, $ in front of one or both numbers is a cell to show absolute entry e.g. C2 = B2 * $A2 when copied to C3 will read C3 = B3 * $A2 whereas without the dollar sign it would read C3 = B3 * A3. Mick also included a column for analysis where he created a dropdown menu with the list of analysis definitions starting with income and then, neatly separated by a dashed line, expenditure. Use of the drop down menu rather than typing the analysis heading each time avoids the risk of inconsistency creating an error in the analysis spread sheet.

You can add additional pages to a single file so, although he could have created his Analysis on another part of the same sheet as the data entry, MIck made a new sheet titled Analysis. Starting with the analysis of income, in the first column he made an identical copy of the list in the drop down menu on the data entry sheet. In the second column used the “SUM” and “IF” formula to sum the total of the income relating to each analysis heading in turn, finally summing to a grand total adding a third column to show the percentage represented by each part of the total. He created a separate table for income expenditure. Finally he showed how to create colourful charts to display the data, in this case the percentage in a pie chart. The chart title headings can be edited by double clicking on them and in the case of the pie chart individual slices can be dragged out, all very Apple and user friendly.

David W had a problem with loading a very large number of photos to iCloud and although he still had plenty of storage capacity left the only explanation we could come up with was one suggested by Mick: possibly the total remaining storage needed to complete the transfer exceeded the actual storage available. David was going to add some storage and see if that fixed it.
On John M’s request David M gave a quick demonstration of saving web archives and the option of saving as pdfs.
Euan ended the evening by showing some short Affinity Photo videos to open our eyes to the new Affinity Designer for iPad.

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