How to Track Mountain Lion Compatibility Using Numbers and Roaring Apps

The following instructions were created by Jane Griffiths, author of MacStrings.com. Jane can be reached on Twitter at @Jane73.

Creating the Spreadsheet

1. Open Numbers and choose the Checklist template for your spreadsheet.

Rename Table and Columns

The Checklist template produces a Numbers spreadsheet containing a Checklist Table.

1. Rename the Table from Checklist to "App OS Compatibility Checklist".

2. Name the checkbox column "Confirmed"

3. Rename the Date column as "OS X Compatible" and the Task column as "Application"

Add Pop-Up Menu to Column B

Add Pop-up Lists to column B with the choice of "Lion" or "Mountain Lion"
To do this:

Select Column B but excluded Row 1 from the selection as this contains the row heading label. In other words, select column B from Row 2 downwards.

In the Numbers Inspector, go to Cells and choose "Pop-up Menu" from the Cell Format drop-down list.

Add the appropriate text for the Pop-ups. In my case I chose OS 10.7 Lion for the first choice and OS 10.8 Mountain Lion for the second pop-up choice.

The Customised Spreadsheet

This is how the spreadsheet now looks.

The spreadsheet is ready to have the list of applications added to column C.

List of Mac OS X Applications

Open the Applications folder in Finder and select all the applications. (Command + A)

Copy the selected applications. (Command+ C)

Pasting the Applications List

The list of applications can be pasted straight into the Numbers spreadsheet, but Numbers will misbehave and produce multiple copies of the list in the spreadsheet.

You can just delete the unwanted copies,

Or…

Open up a new TextEdit file, go to TextEdit>Format>Make Plain Text and paste the list into the TextEdit file. Then, within TextEdit, select the list of applications and copy.

Paste the list of applications from theTextEdit file into column C on the spreadsheet.

If you want to match the blue text colour, then control click or right click and choose Paste and Match Style.

Spreadsheet Complete

The spreadsheet can now be used to show which applications are compatible with 10.8 Mountain Lion.

When an app is confirmed to be Mountain Lion compatible, you can choose to show that from the corresponding Pop-Up list in column B and tick the check box to show you have checked compatibility for that app.

One source of OS X compatibility information is the RoaringApps Compatibility Table
at http://roaringapps.com/apps:table

Source of Application Compatibility Information

Use the RoaringApps Compatibility Table at http://roaringapps.com/apps:table for the latest news on Mac application compatibility.

The table of compatibility is continually updated as applications are tested and so it is worth checking back regularly as we approach the release of Mountain Lion.

Do not rely solely on the information provided by RoaringApps table, it is only a guide.