Q: what happened to autocomplete in numbers?

I am also very sadened by this; I have to type in every single entry, yet my entries are very similar from time to time (car models + makes, cities, etc...) It is a real pain now!

+1 on bringing back autocomplete feature in Numbers!

Ask Apple to bring the feature back:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/numbers.html

This is just one of the very latest annoying changes that Apple have made to Numbers. Just how much of my time do Apple intend wasting when then intoduce new versions of an application. I spent a silly amount of time trying to find out how I switched on the auto complete function only to eventually discover that Apple for reasons best know to them have got rid of it.

Has anybody discovered a workaround please?

Feedback has been sent to Apple.

Hi Dave,

Apple has already announced they will reinstate "autocomplete text in cells" so providing feedback on that particular feature probably isn't necessary any longer. 

Even after it is brought back, though, you should 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 are worried about typos, Pop-Up Menu has clear advantages over "autocomplete" anyway.  It is much enhanced over what it was in Numbers 2.3, and is very easy to set up:

Select the whole column or a 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.

In Numbers 3.0 there is no keyboard shortcut to activate the menu such as hitting the spacebar in the old Numbers (hope they'll add one in upcoming versions) but the Pop-Up Menu approach has some advantages over autocompletion: no spelling errors or lack of capitalization when there should be capitalization, etc.

And should you ever want to take your Numbers with you, in a touch interface pop-ups are much 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.

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

SG