Combined spreadsheet and word processor

June 17, 2013 2:56 PM

Other than OneNote and its Mac companion Growly Notes, is there any program (Win or Mac) that presents both a spreadsheet and a space for editing text all on the same page? This would seem a natural for those who like to tinker with open source software.
posted by megatherium to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Best answer: The Apple spreadsheet Numbers might do more or less what you want -- unlike typical spreadsheets, in which the table is the primary structure, Numbers has pages which contain one or more tables, charts, etc.. The same pages can also contain text boxes, so you can (for instance) have a table at the top of a page and a block of text with description beneath.
posted by irrelephant at 3:04 PM on June 17, 2013

Word or Excel, obviously, will do this through OLE.

In Word: Insert > Object > Microsoft Excel Worksheet

In Excel: Insert > Text Box (to create a simple text box)
        or: Insert > Object > Word Document (to insert a Word document)
posted by kindall at 3:19 PM on June 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

Irrelephant is right. For that matter, tables in Apple's Pages are slightly dumbed-down versions of the spreadsheets in Numbers. It comes down to whether you want mostly numbers with some text or mostly text with some numbers.

And, for that matter, you can insert formulas into tables in Word, but that way lies madness.
posted by adamrice at 3:21 PM on June 17, 2013

The Z88 had PipeDream as one of its ROM applications. It was pretty powerful for its time (1987), and its platform: a 3.3 MHz Z80 running from penlight cells.
posted by scruss at 5:53 PM on June 17, 2013