Problem with updating date in a cell in Numbers

It is supposed to update automatically. It should update whenever you open the document. It should update whenever a change is made to any table in the document. I do not know why it would not but you are not the first to have this happen. I think the NOW function also has the same problem for some people.

You could use the TODAY function in just one of your tables and reference that cell in the others. Maybe that will work better, with only the one to worry about and only the one to fix if it messes up.

I recommend going to Numbers/Provide Numbers Feedback and filing a bug report.

Patso73 wrote:

a big waist of time to copy paste every 20 min.

Curious, why you would need to paste every 20 minutes? Numbers is good for crunching numbers and presenting data. It's not really designed to act as a near real-time portfolio tracker. There are many good options for that. So why not use one of those, and use Numbers for what it's best at?

SG

The STOCK function is not real time, it will update once a day.

Hi Patso,

Let us know how well the reference to a Google Sheet works for getting more recent(and more frequent) stock data updates in Numbers.

Regards,

Barry

Patso73 wrote:

I will try another way, a back door through reference from a google spreadsheet.

To see how you may find this tutorial video as useful as I did.

SG

Hi Patso73,

Tested in Numbers 10.2 under macOS Catalina 10.15.4

Yesterday (12 Dec in Australia) I inserted the TODAY function into a document named "TODAY not closed". I formatted the cell to show TODAY as weekday, day of month, month and year to make this more 'international'.

I did not close that document and I did not shut down my computer.

Today (13 Dec in Australia) TODAY has not updated

But when I edited that document (a trivial change by clicking on the Tick Box in cell C1) TODAY updated.

Here is a screen shot of a copy of that document named "TODAY closed & reopened" that I did close on 12 Dec. On reopening that document on13 Dec and without making any edits, TODAY has automatically updated

Please test on your machine before you make a bug report. If your results differ from mine, please include a link to this discussion in your bug report.

Regards,

Ian.

Patso writes:

"Or at least if automatic update can't be done in Numbers, at the very minimum there should be a refresh button that on demand refreshes your whole sheet when you click it. That way it would instantly update what is referenced from the google sheet.

Calculations in a Numbers table can be refreshed by setting the data format of an unused cell to Checkbox. Each time you click the box, toggling it between true and false, it's a change in the table and triggers a full recalculation.

That may help, but won't be effective in doing what you want, as Yahoo! Financial provides only the previous day's closing price to Numbers' STOCK function..

I'm not going to copy paste lots of data from Google to Numbers, or close and reopen it every 20 min. It doesn't make sense and it's a waist of time. I've tried but didn't find any way yet to refresh a whole page quickly in numbers."

It may not "make sense," and it does require action from the user at regular (or irregular) intervals, but it does, apparently, supply fresh data to the table. "Refreshing a whole table quickly in [N]umbers" is also simple, but does not supply fresh data, as noted in the paragraph above. (Numbers has 'pages' only when you are printing or preparing to print)

"Fresh data" directly to Numbers is not an issue that can be solved in this user-to-user community. It's one that will require a different agreement between Apple and the supplier of the data accessed by the STOCK function

Use Provide Numbers Feedback, found in the Numbers menu, to make a Feature Enhancement Request directly to Apple.

Regards,

Barry