Tom Gorham
Creating good-looking charts and graphs can be a real chore in Excel. Thankfully, iWork’s built-in templates make the whole process a breeze.
As befits a suite made by Apple, iWork applications carry a deserved reputation for good looks. Base a document on one of its built-in templates and it’s well nigh impossible to produce something ugly.
And if you’ve ever wrestled with creating attractive pie charts in Excel – something that’s exposed my design limitations – it’s clear that nowhere is iWork’s presentational beauty more marked than in the charts it creates. Whether you’re in Keynote, Pages or Numbers, graphs look great, irrespective of the data that sits behind them.
In fact, it’s so easy to create and edit 3D bar charts, exploded pie charts and mixed charts, that I’ve found myself using iWork to create diagrams that I use in other applications. That’s not as awkward a solution as it sounds. I’ve exported charts from Numbers to Adobe InDesign documents by putting the chart on its own sheet and saving it as a PDF (either by exporting as a PDF or using the Print menu to create a PostScript file and saving this as a PDF). From there, you can drag it into InDesign, where it remains as high-quality vector artwork.
While that has proved useful enough on occasion, though, what I find most under-appreciated about iWork 09′s charting abilities is the way you can share chart information across all applications.
Keeping charts and data separately updated in each iWork application can be a chore if the underlying data changes, and what iWork 09 allows you to do is to share the data from a Numbers spreadsheet and reference it from Pages and Keynote. Having one source of data for a chart or graph obviously makes life simpler and means fewer chances of the data getting out of sync.
Establishing a link to the data in different applications is simple. If you have tabular data in a Numbers spreadsheet that you want to display as a chart in other iWork documents, you first create a chart in Numbers to illustrate this table and then copy it. Open Pages or Keynote, position the cursor at the point you want to insert the chart and choose File > Paste. It’s really that simple. The only thing that tripped me up the first time I did this was that I wasn’t working from a saved Numbers file. Neither Pages nor Keynote will link to an untitled Numbers document, so remember to save it first.
When you click on a chart that has been copied from Numbers to Pages or Keynote, you should see a black arrow pointing towards it. This arrow – it can be extended to reveal more information – shows the file name of the original Numbers document to which it’s linked. Clicking on this takes you straight back to the Numbers document – making it a quick job to return and edit the data on which the chart is based. The arrow also includes a chunky Sync button and whenever you click this, you re-import data from the spreadsheet and the chart is automatically updated accordingly.
While I’ve been experimenting with this feature, I’ve noticed a few things that I haven’t seen widely documented. For example, if you subsequently decide you would like the chart you’ve already embedded in Pages to appear in a Keynote presentation, you can copy and paste it. The link back to the original Numbers document survives the second pasting. You can, however, only use Numbers as the source of the data. If you create a table and chart in Pages, you can copy it to Keynote or Numbers, although there’s no link between them.
It’s also important to remember that for fairly sensible reasons the syncing works one way only. While you’re free to edit the data and the chart in Pages or Keynote as if you’d created it locally, when you press the arrow’s Sync button these changes don’t translate back to the Numbers document. In fact, an inadvertent press of this button could ruin everything: if you’ve made changes to the data in Pages and attempt to sync these back to Numbers, it’s the data from the Numbers document that will be reimported again and the changes to the data that you made locally are wiped out. If you’ve made changes in Pages or Keynote and want to keep them, you need to remember to click the Unlink button in the arrow to remove the link between applications.
Not everything has to be the same in Numbers and Pages charts. While the data has to be consistent between the applications, you can make substantial changes to the appearance of the charts in your Pages or Keynote – for example, changing their colours, adjusting the angle of 3D charts or even turning them from pie charts to bar graphs, without breaking the link back to Numbers. You can do this without ill effect because, although it appears that you’re copying the chart from Numbers to other iWork documents, the link you’re actually making is to the Numbers data itself.
As an aside, as we’re talking about personalising charts, it’s worth highlighting the rather confusing way iWork deals with colouring them. The obvious way for chart newcomers to select chart colours is by clicking the Inspector’s Chart tab and pressing the Chart Colors button, which is useful if you need to apply a set of colours or textures to a particular chart (click the Apply All button to do this). It’s just as easy to select the Graphic Inspector, and with the bar or segment in a chart selected, choose a colour from the Fill menu. Even quicker is to drag a colour from the Colors Palette (View > Colors) over the relevant element of the chart.
But back to linking charts. The biggest weakness of what’s otherwise an excellent feature is that charts don’t automatically update either when the underlying data changes, or when the document is opened or saved. Nor do you get any indication that data in the linked document has changed, so you find yourself nervously pressing the Sync button every so often, just in case. And as there’s no universal Sync button, if you have linked multiple charts in a Keynote presentation, you end up having to perform the same syncing routine for each one.
Still, the feature’s potential is superb. I really wanted to have a chart in a presentation that could update from a Numbers spreadsheet, even when that spreadsheet is stored remotely – something that comes into its own if you’re giving a presentation somewhere while the data on which it’s based was still being worked on back in the office. It’s something that I couldn’t see a way to do with iWork, even with the help of AppleScript or Automator.
It turns out that there was a simple solution. I just needed to keep the original Numbers document accessible on a cloud storage service such as MobileMe’s iDisk or Dropbox, and reference the chart in Pages and Keynote from that. As long as you remember to sync from Keynote or Pages, you should get the latest chart information no matter where you are.
