Q: where has text auto complete gone in new numbers

Just keep using the Numbers '09 that you were using before the update was issued.

Jerry

Sad to see that, Auto-Completion, was stripped in, Numbers 3.  I'm only a novice user, but I can't use Numbers 3 until, if ever, Apple reinstates it.  I have a feeling that this feature is not compatible with iCloud and iOS devices.

Good thing I didn't delete Numbers 2.3!!

Thanks for confirming that I hadn't gone crazy.  Gone back to the earlier Numbers...

Well that is not acceptable!  There should be some fix for this!  Why take out something that is not broken?!  Come on Apple I am expecting more from my freee software!

Numbers 09 appears to have been deleted during the 'upgrade' to numbers for Mavericks. Can it still be downloaded? Without auto-complete the app is a significant downgrade from the earlier version.

Numbers 09 appears to have been deleted during the 'upgrade' 

and of course you have no Time Machine (or other) backup?

Yep, I have TM on my home imac but not on the mac mini where I am now for the next month! I suppose I will have to wait until I get back to the UK.

I just bought my first Apple devices, I plunged in with an iMac and iPads for the family. After using numbers for a week or so and reading threads like this, I am already wondering where exactly Apple is going as far as office productivity apps go.

Have Apple waved the white flag to MS and exiting stage right from the productivity apps arena? Seems so, as some absolute basic funtionality seems to have been removed lately. This thread is not the only example of regression I have already found and I am a very basic user. Very puzzling. Do I bother learning Pages, Numbers, Keynote etc or have Apple cast them adrift?

Hi enuenu,

Apple seems to be actively developing iWorks apps again after a long hiatus. The big push has been to make the apps work well with both Macs and iOS devices, something that MS has not been able to match. The tradeoff so far has been elimination of some features that are hard to implement in iOS. Apple has announced in this support document that auto-complete and several other features will be reintroduced, however.

But even after "auto-complete" is brought back you might want to consider formatting the cells in the column as Pop-Up Menu if you frequently enter repeating values in a column and don't want to type the same text over and over again.

In many situations, particularly if you want to avoid typos or capitalization inconsistencies creeping in and messing up your data, Pop-Up Menu is better than "auto-complete." It is much enhanced over what it was in Numbers 2.3, and is easy to set up:

Select the whole column or range before formatting as Pop-Up Menu and your existing values in that column or range will pre-populate a menu automatically:

Then you can remove the values you don't want in the list, such as the column header (and possibly some previous spelling errors too!):

And after this easy one-time setup all you have to do thereafter is to choose from the pop-up list when you add rows:

See this post for more details on how this handy feature has been enhanced in Numbers 3.0.

If you want to use Numbers on an iPad or iPhone, in a touch interface pop-ups are far more efficient than typing the first few letters of items. You can scroll with ease through a list of dozens of items to make a pick. Anybody using Numbers cross-platform should favor Pop-Up so they can use their documents efficiently for data input on the go, which can be a productivity booster.

Also, auto-complete is not as good a choice as Pop-Up Menu even for keyboard-intensive work on the Mac if you've got numerous hard-to-spell values, particularly if some are capitalized and some not, where the capitalization can be significant. The Pop-Up Menu approach, unlike auto-complete, eliminates spelling inconsistencies or lack of capitalization when there should be capitalization, etc.

See this thread for this and other workarounds for Numbers 3.0.

SG

Hi SGIII,

Thanks for such an informative response, much appreciated. I will examine it in detail. Good to hear that Apple are not letting their productivity apps fade away. One of the reasons I would prefer to persevere and learn Pages, Numbers and Keynote (rather than jump to MS Office) is that it leaves scope to do real work on iPads.

Regards

enuenu

One of the reasons I would prefer to persevere and learn Pages, Numbers and Keynote (rather than jump to MS Office) is that it leaves scope to do real work on iPads.

If your goal is to do real work on iPads then I think the current version of iWork is at least one step ahead of MS.  It will be interesting to see how Apple continues to develop it.  As it stands now, Numbers for iOS is surprisingly effective at entering data that syncs back automatically to the Mac. It's also good at displaying spreadsheets in an attractive and interactive way that can be more efficient than printing out piles of stuff.  Numbers on the Mac is clearly better for setting up spreadsheets from scratch.  Used together with Numbers for iOS it already provides an innovative environment that takes advantage of the Apple ecosystem in a way that MS may have trouble matchng. As the processing power of iOS devices grows, I'm hoping it will get better.

SG