Hi Jay,
Infinite tables may be an excellent concept for Excel, but it's contrary to the design model of Numbers.
You can create a template with a large number of rows (to a maximum of 65,535 on a single table), but I think you would find it quite frustrating and essentially unusable.
You can get some idea of the issues that would arise by creating a Numbers document with, say, three times the number of rows as you expect to have items, That would be 1800 rows at one row per item. Throw in another 200 rows to bring it up to a round 2000.
Open the Blank template. Unless things have changed. this will open a document with one Sheet, on which there is one Table with 13 columns and 45 rows, including one header row and one header column.
To increase the number of rows to 2048 (the first power of 2 greater than 2000), start by selecting rows 1 through 19, then pressing option-down arrow. This inserts 19 rows, bringing the total rows to 64.
Now repeat the following two steps four times:
1. Click on the column reference tab for column A to select the whole column.
2. Press option-down arrow to add as many rows as are selected to the table.
After the fourth iteration, you should see the selection rectangle on cell A1025.
Save your table as a Template.
The new 2048 row blank table will now be available in the "My Templates" section of the Template Chooser.
Enjoy.
Regards,
Barry
PS: I've never experienced the difficulty you note on adding a sheet. The sheet is added and includes a blank table. Both are part of the current Document, but both are also independent from the Table(s) and Sheet(s) already contained in the document until you establish some connection between them. Perhaps that's what you mean by 'not recognized as part of the working document.'
Regarding "...another thing their programmers could fix":
If you think this is a bug, you should send Apple a bur report asking to have it fixed. If it's a feature you'd like to see implemented, you should send Apple a feature request.
Apple does not actively monitor these user-to-user forums; here you're talking to/with software users, not Apple developers. For bug reports or feature requests, talk directly to Apple through the Feedback channel. In Numbers, you'll find a menu item, Provide Numbers Feedback, in the Numbers menu.
B