Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Apple Numbers appears to display a + instead of a / or ÷ for the division formula

I'm on Mojave for a while (Aperture) so I get to use an old version of Apple's spreadsheet - Numbers 10.1 (6913). It think this is still true however.

If I type a formula that divides one cell by another the Formula bar shows this:


It is actually doing division, but instead of a / or other operator it seems to displays a +.

If you add the same too numbers the formula  bar shows

A 2015 Discussion post explains the problem. This is an artifact of using Numbers on a non-Retina display with the default Numbers font. The first screenshot is actually a ÷ symbol. It's just super hard to see for an Old person using a non-Retina external monitor. (Did they even have Retina displays in 2015? Maybe Apple Devs had them?)

I suspect it's never been fixed -- so I'm gonna call this a bug. Apple is such a weird company and Numbers is weird even for Apple. There are many things I like about it but every so often something like this shows up. (Also, the Help function reminds me how bad macOS Help is.)

FWIW Numbers has an ePub User Guide and an online User Guide (version 12, but you can tweak the URL and seems to show 10.1).

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