Apple today released an improved version of Numbers along with the rest of the iWork ’09 office suite.

They’ve taken this opportunity to really enhance their support for calculations in the spreadsheet. Numbers ’09 now includes over 250 functions each with built-in help and support for visual placeholders for each variable of the formula – instead of the old A1:D12 format you may be used to from Excel. To assist with this, Numbers also has a Formula List view for all of the calculations in your spreadsheet. And you can search this list by formula, function, or cell reference.

Charts are another area that Apple focused on improving this year. They’ve put considerable work into improving the different ways you might want to chart your data. In addition, they’ve also added the ability to link your charts from Numbers to either Pages or Keynote. And, you can change the chart styles, textures, colors, and fonts in your Pages document or Keynote presentation and they’ll stay linked to the original data in Numbers.

You can try out Numbers by downloading the free iWork ’09 trial.