Numbers: Auto-add rows/columns to multiple tables

The reason I don't want to go with pivot tables is that there are different people working on different aspects of their data. The samples that I'm showing you have nothing to do with the actual data but is close enough is an extremely simple way for me to show you a sample of what I'm trying to do for them. I then give them READ_ONLY rights to the file.

But since they will each be looking at different aspects of the data it is easier to have totally separate tables for each person or group that is working on a separate part of the data.

I will convert my horizontal tables to vertical ones. I will run out of columns far before I would run out of rows. I've been thinking about that already.

But I was hoping that there was a way that I haven't been able to find myself that could add new rows to a table without having to manually add them which I'm doing now. And since there are about 50 different tables I have 49 different tables that I have to add a new column or row (in the near future just new rows).

Back in the '80s with Lotus 1-2-3 I could do so much more than what I can do with Numbers. I've thought about switching to Libré Office but it is so different than any other spreadsheet that I've used before that I would have to start from scratching learning everything which I'm trying to avoid due to time limitations.

As always, I appreciate your help. I've learned a lot because of you and to a lesser extent Badunit.

One of the things about Apple Numbers is that you can only sort by columns. And I'm talking about just sorting and not with Pivot tables but just sorting, is that you can only sort by columns with no option to sort by Rows. Back in the mid '80s Lotus 1-2-3 could sort by either columns OR rows. And yet Apple Numbers, here in 2026 STILL can't sort by Rows!

I had forgotten that this was the reason I had some of my tables where I'm adding columns instead of rows specially because of the lack of this feature that was in spreadsheets back in the mid '80s for any other company. Just another reason that if I had the choice between mid '80s Lotus 1-2-3 I would absolutely pick mid '80s Lotus 1-2-3 over Apple Numbers any day of the week, year, or century!

Yes, I'm frustrated. I'm running around in circles doing and undoing things because of limitations with Apple Numbers. So now I have to change ALL of my tables where I need to sort data for reports to where I'm adding columns instead of rows. And yes, I'm going to ask for this to be added to Numbers.

Pretty much every thing I've asked for to be added to Apple Numbers are things that Lotus 1-2-3 could do back in the '80s. 😖

[Edited by Moderator]

And where is Lotus 1-2-3 now? Clearly that wasn't enough of a feature benefit to keep it alive.

You clearly don't know your history about Microsoft and the rest of the world and politics inside of IBM.

For those of us that were living history back then it was PROVEN that Microsoft was NOT giving the same hooks into the operating system that they were giving to the office team and the rest of the teams in Microsoft.

The hooks that they gave "the industry" were slower hooks, less capable hooks into Windows which made their applications slower and caused them to have to do more programming to get the same functionality.

When 50% of what mattered was and is about speed, if you are slower in a 100 yard race or in updating a spreadsheet or a document or anything else, how does that appear to users?

Microsoft was also NOTORIOUS about using their increasing power to block competitors on shelf space back when you had to go into a store to buy programs before the internet existed or before the internet was mature enough for companies to sell their programs on-line and people were able to download and install them.

There is also the issue of IBM's divisions where the mainframe team was terrified of PCs and OS/2 taking away their share of the profits and so they did everything they could to hamper the Lotus Office team and the OS/2 operating system team. This is NOT conjecture but has been confirmed by people that worked for IBM and not third parties but the parties that were responsible for those actions.

Microsoft NEVER should have been allowed to have BOTH operating systems AND programs that competed with the rest of the industry. They should have been split up into two separate companies. Microsoft has slowed the rate of progress as much as they can just like a basketball team that can't or isn't willing to compete offensively, when that happens the way you win is to slow down the competition and Microsoft has done an excellent job of doing that.

For an example, I didn't need to one bit of "programming" to input ALL of the data from all of the Dungeons and Dragons books into a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and then create a character sheet where ALL of the data from ALL of the D&D books were used in the character sheet.

Got a new weapon? Just start typing the name of it and a list would pop up for all the weapons that matched what you were typing. Just keep typing and the list would dwindle until one or a small few would be in the list and you could either click on the one that matched your weapon or keep typing until only one was left and you hit enter and all the stats that were affected by that weapon were updated almost instantly. The same was true for spells, for shields and everything else.

It took creating a new character from maybe an hour down to a few minutes because you could see very quickly what was affected in real time.

Want a second, third, four, etc., more characters? Easy, just create another sheet and then copy and paste the blank character sheet to this new sheet and then take a few minutes and you have another character sheet. Again, all without programming but just with formulas and functions in Lotus 1-2-3.

In order to build that in Excel you have to be a VisualBasic programmer. I learned and became a very good VisualBasic programmer but 99% of people out there will never be a programmer and learn VB. But they had everything they needed with the formulas and functions in Lotus 1-2-3 to build pretty much anything that their hearts could desire without learning how to program.

And that D&D spreadsheet that I made needed only about 20% of the capabilities of what you could do with formulas and functions in Lotus 1-2-3. I know, because I created a LOT more complex spreadsheets programs in Lotus 1-2-3 at work.

As for Word, it was a text editor compared to WordPerfect in DOS and the early versions of Windows. It wasn't due to the lack of programming skills at the Word Perfect Corporation before they sold the company to Novel which then sold it so Corel.

With hooks into the OS that were faster and had more capabilities the teams at Microsoft had access to the teams that created the hooks which allowed them to spend a lot less time making Word for Windows than it took for the teams at Word Perfect to create Word Perfect for Windows. It wasn't that Word Perfect for Windows wasn't as good as Word for Windows. It was that it was SLOWER because the hooks that Microsoft gave everyone outside of Microsoft were slower and had less functionality.

When the federal government wouldn't step in and force Microsoft to split up the company into the Operating Systems and everything else, AND the federal government wouldn't audit Microsoft and see that what they were getting vs everyone outside of Microsoft, well the writing was on the wall. Word Perfect Corporation sold Word Perfect to Novel.

Why didn't the feds step in and do something about it? Because the people in the federal government were thinking about the 1920s and not the software industry of the 1980s. They didn't have a clue what was going on because the congress persons and the senate persons were mostly lawyers with ZERO percent of them being able to tell you what software was, how it was made, that hooks were used to connect to operating systems and depending on the versions of the hooks that were given how big of an advantage it gave Microsoft internally vs the rest of the industry.

Your software didn't need to be anywhere near as good as someone else's when it was as lot faster. And while the rest of the industry was programming with hooks into Windows that were like anchors slowing their software down, Microsoft was able to use those exact seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and then years to improve their products because they weren't hampered with the anchors the rest of the industry was working with.

THAT is why MS Office became popular. NOT because everyone else's products were less good or less capable. They were SLOWER and when most people use 2% of the capabilities of the software they are using and Microsoft was able to make that 2% people used, faster than the competition, well what do you EXPECT to happen?

To give a car example, imagine racing against an F1 team where you had to use bias ply tires vs a team that controlled what tires you could use, when tenths of a second is EVERYTHING in F1, imagine you having a car that is significantly better with every other part of your car except for you being stuck with tires that causes you to have to break much earlier and will spin out if you apply all of your throttle or as much throttle as the team that determines what tires YOU get to use vs THEM. And then who wins the race? The team that controls what tires everyone is allowed to use while THEY get to use any tires they want to.

Fair? No! Would it be allowed in F1 or any other racing organization? It's not about cheating the rules. It's about who controls the rules. And if any team controlled the rules for everyone else while not being tied to those same rules, well it is very obvious as to which team would win the races.

Now add infighting in teams where the team that makes the suspension makes the most on a team but if another group on the team like the team in charge of the braking systems on the car, was able to add anti-slip and ABS and suddenly that team would be moving up in the standings and because of that the owners might start funneling more of the money through THAT team, well maybe the person in charge of the suspension is married to the daughter of the owners and they work it so that the daughter talks the father into not giving more money to the team in charge of the brakes and whether or not the race car has ABS.

I mean, who cares if you are going to be either 16th or 17th in the standings it won't really affect how much money any part of the team gets. And the owner's profits with the race team is a rounding error vs what they are making with the company that they are running which gives them the money to have a race team as a side project for fun. That is what the office and operating system teams were to IBM back then. And when the people in charge of the mainframe (hardware and software) is worried that more money might be going to the PC software teams if they start being successful in getting more people to buy their software, well the mainframe team didn't want that so they too were fighting against the teams in charge of the Lotus smart suite and the OS/2 team.

It wasn't that Lotus 1-2-3 wasn't as good as Excel in the early years of Windows. It wasn't that OS/2 (which started out as a collaboration of not just IBM and Microsoft but over 15 companies were involved, IBM and Microsoft were just the biggest teams that were involved) wasn't as good as Windows 3.1 because it was SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER because DOS and Win 3.1 software was more stable running in DOS and Win 3.1 sessions on OS/2 than native DOS or native Win 3.1).

I know because I focused on focused on the people that were having the most problems with ANY software they were running. And from my own experience I KNEW that software was more stable on OS/2. So I took a computer and installed OS/2 on it and then installed the software that people were having problems with and told them it was a special version of Windows. And I had them use it and they had SIGNIFICANTLY less problems. AND it ran faster on OS/2 than it did on native DOS or native Win 3.1.

If IBM had run ads showing two exact same computers running the exact same software on DOS or Win 3.1 vs running them with OS/2 with the speed difference, instead of running idiotic ads of nuns walking down a hallway speaking Italian which only people that knew OS/2 had a clue what was OS/2 was when seeing those ads.

I bought a PC and installed OS/2 on it. More and more I'm moving things that I can over to that. Since I have so much time and effort put into the spreadsheet on Numbers I was hoping to find some answers and you kept giving me ways I could more with Numbers but now I'm hitting a wall as far as automation with Numbers.

I've provided feedback to Apple as far as things I would like added to or improvements to Numbers. I'll see in the future if I continue with Apple as far as desktop computers or not. A lot of that rides on whether they make an M series of the iMac, be it a "normal" iMac or an iMac Pro. If they don't, the odds that I'll buy another Apple computer goes down by 90%. I'm absolutely sick of cables and even with an iMac I have eight cables coming out of the back for external hard drives for more storage and for backups.

But if they don't have software that can do what I want and I have other options that are better; OS/2 with Lotus 1-2-3 and Word Perfect when they still used Word Perfect's scripting language and not VB, both of which are FAR more powerful than Numbers or Pages; then I'll go that way.

Everything I need for email and texting I can do with my iPhone, I don't need a desktop/laptop computer for that.

But the biggest thing by far is whether they make an iMac (27" or bigger), normal or pro, will determine if I buy another Apple computer or not. Not if Numbers and Pages can do everything that I want.

It will take me a while for me to transfer everything including all my formulas and functions over to Lotus 1-2-3. In the meantime I'll run them parallel and I might start writing a C program for this instead of using a spreadsheet. That will give me a lot more flexibility. But again, I was thinking about doing that on an Apple computer but they don't make 27" (or larger) iMacs anymore otherwise I would be using Swift on Apple.