[rant]I understand their necessity, but I HATE design copyrights! I've got no Windows experience, so I've got no feel for how it differs from macOS, but I recently switched from Excel to Numbers, and I'm almost overwhelmed by the differences.[/rant]

Excel has a pref that enabled me to select the direction in which my cursor moves when I hit "return" after entering data in a cell...my preference being to the cell to the right. Numbers defaults to the cell below, and if there's a way to change it, I've had zero luck finding it.

Anybody?

Thanks!

Well, I don't use Numbers. But, in Excel, the right arrow key will move the focus to the right.

Excel offers pref options, and as you just said, reacts to the arrow keys too, but while Numbers also reacts to the arrows, "return" as "move cursor right" works better for me, and I'd like it to be able to set it as my default, but...

The option may not exist, but Tab will move you to the next cell. On a standard keyboard this move can be done with the left little finger, as opposed to the right little finger for Return. This move also keeps your brain energized, like brushing your teeth with your opposite hand.

For what it is worth I just checked MacPilot 14, that has literally thousands of hidden macOS preference settings and the only hidden Numbers preferences it offers are:

• Do not create TOC for Excel documents
• Save compression level
• Use human-readable XML file format

So I think you are out of luck.

Thanks, all, for the input.

I'm not the least bit sure why I'm married to the pref, but I guess I'll just have to learn to live without it and use the arrows instead.

I'd love to have been around for some of the discussions about which aspects of Excel could and couldn't be reproduced in Numbers, and how to reproduce the ones that could.

It seems like the app was developed by lawyers, rather than by software engineers.

Artie:

If you want to revert to Excel, check out Early Black Friday deal drops Microsoft Office for Mac Home & Business 2021 to $39.99

Thanks a million for that, Jon! I've done the deal already.

I had decided to forego upgrading my Office installation, because I didn't feel like investing another $75 or so, but I'm finding Numbers annoying enough that it's worth the $40.

Icing! First time in a few years that I haven't been charged sales tax.

(I first checked to make certain that Numbers can export to Excel.)

You've apparently got body parts that I've never even heard of!

Thanks again, Jon.

I didn't realize how much I missed Excel until I restored it...as they say, it's a mechaya!

Much as I dislike Microsoft, I must admit that the Office suite is really good. The only app that I use is Word, but I can't abide by Pages (annoying and unintuitive). Word does what I want and even my wife (technology challenged) can use it.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that design copyrights dictate that whoever comes first gets the right of way, and everyone else has got to navigate around them, so Numbers, Pages, and any other Apple apps that mimic MS Office apps are basically compilations of workarounds and compromises.

Similarly, Windows suffers the same fate in reverse.

Having run Numbers for a month or two and reverted to Excel, I'm now married to Excel.

I've tried Numbers a few times thinking that, if I could get an Apple spreadsheet equivalent to Excel, I'd change over. But, I've always found Numbers had too many differences to make a changeover easy.

My guess is it's because Excel started off on the Mac and was GIF from the ground up instead of trying to adapt software to be "like" the Mac (Windows comes to mind). I recall using MS Multiplan, the only spreadsheet available for Mac when the machine was first released, and it was 'okay' but Excel (about 1984 or 1985) blew it out of the water. Excel was so good that Microsoft ported it over to 'those other machines' about three years later.

I just noticed that the same file that was 2.3 MB in Numbers is 53 KB in Excel.

And If you looked inside the Numbers file you will find it is, or at least used to be, a package file. (I vaguely recall reading somewhere that Apple had changed the internal format, perhaps to a database format) but in either case there are multiple files in the package. The reported file size is the size of the allocated sectors and each file gets a separate sector, but the actual data content is often significantly less.

Same as with block size v block contents, then?

Yep!