Since its release in 2007, Numbers has been the more colorful, designer-friendly spreadsheet application. I have long recommended it for producing beautiful tables and appreciated its support for multiple tables on one page, something Excel has never figured out.

This week, I outline one of the newest features for arranging and more easily understanding data: Categories. Smart categories make it possible to summarize data in a spreadsheet in a grouped fashion.

This feature requires the latest version of Numbers, which supports macOS 10.13 or later.

Disorganized Data

Suppose a table has a date column and various sets of rows have the same date. It’s pretty challenging to capture the meaning of these data.

What if you could group the dates and sum the usage figures for each?

Set a Category

First, show the Organize palette and choose Categories. Then, select a column to group data, e.g., Date. This causes the table to show collapsible sections for each date in the list.

Add a Summary

There are several ways to summarize grouped data. On any parent row of a group, click on a cell in one of the data columns.

For example, I clicked on the Usage cell for the 07/12/2019 parent row (with the disclosure triangle on the left). A gear button appears to the right and I can click it to select a type of summary.

Show a Subtotal

I chose to subtotal the data usage column so I could quickly see how much data usage occured on each day. I also collapsed the groups for a cleaner look. (You can collapse or expand all groups at once by holding Option and clicking a disclosure triangle.)

The result is so much more meaningful that the original, unorganized table.

Without a fuss, you can easily take categories a step further by adding subcategories for steeper hierarchies as well as creating charts that visualize summarized data. What’s in your spreadsheet?