How do I insert today's date in a cell on Numbers 3.0?

SGIII, you're a star. That works an absolute treat. Thanks very much.

Only got one last problem to solve, if you can help?

I need to highlight cell A1 if cell C1 contains "anything", using conditional highlighting. Do you know of a way to do that?

I know where conditional highlighting is, but I can't get it to work based on another cell's contents.

Thanks.

Adam.

Hi Ian,

keystroke "v" using {option shift command down}

I think I got that right. Anyway the equivalent of this:

That's exactly it! I expecting to see Yellowbox scripts any day now!

The original script upthread dates from Numbers 3.0 days when all one could do was "GUI scripting" like this. Now that Numbers 3 has more sophisticated AppleScript support, purists might prefer a more "native" solution. But I've found the paste clipboard approach more efficient.

Interestingly, one can add a date-time stamp like this to almost any application on the Mac. If the application doesn't have Paste and Match Style then the following will usually get the job done:

keystroke "v" usingcommand down

A list of date and time formats that can be produced (the script used +%H:%M) are listed when typing 'man date' in Terminal (the man I think stands for "manual"):

cc Century (either 19 or 20) prepended to the abbreviated

year.

yy Year in abbreviated form (e.g., 89 for 1989, 06 for 2006).

mm Numeric month, a number from 1 to 12.

dd Day, a number from 1 to 31.

HH Hour, a number from 0 to 23.

MM Minutes, a number from 0 to 59.

ss Seconds, a number from 0 to 61 (59 plus a maximum of two

leap seconds).

Everything but the minutes is optional.

That seems to leave out some of the options. And some of the options, such as cc, don't produce the expected result on my machine.

But a little experimentation helps. If you wanted, say, to insert the date string formatted as 2014-05-30 then you could use:

do shell script "date +%Y-%m-%d"

SG

Hi Adam,

I need to highlight cell A1 if cell C1 contains "anything", using conditional highlighting. Do you know of a way to do that?

Since conditional highlighting is a very different topic, why don't you start a new thread? Someone here should be able to help you.

SG

Hi SGII,

sorry to bother you again. This script worked fine for a week, but now it only seems to get as far as "activate" and then doesn't go any further.

I see the name NUMBERS light up in black on the menu bar, but the date doesn't appear.

We haven't changed anything, or updated any system software since installing it.

Any ideas?

I've put up a separate post about this, but no reply for over two days.

Adam.

Hi Adam,

I've replied in this thread.

SG

Hello SGIII

In reference to your apple script for getting today date

can you guide me to write a script for auto date entry for adjacent cell entry and save it (not update overtime i open numbers.

Thanks

Since this is an old thread and you're asking about a new angle (adjacent cell entry) I suggest you pose your question in a new thread, giving as many specifics as you can about what you are trying to do, preferably with a screenshot.

SG

Done sir

Replace you text in setting > keyboard, by something such as ".n" to "=now()".

Then use by type in you cell in Numbers with ".n", press space bar's key then press Enter. 🙂