Q: numbers changes in update - missing features?

Hi Rosemary,

The typing recognition thing is not in Numbers 3.0. Apple has announced they will be restoring it in upcoming releases over the next six months. It's called "Auto-complete text in cells."

Meanwhile, you could consider formatting the column where you frequently enter repeating values as Pop-up Menu. In some ways it's a better approach:

If you frequently enter repeating values in a column you could consider formating the cells as Pop-Up Menu:

If you've selected the whole column before formatting as Pop-Up Menu, your existing values in that column will pre-populate a menu automatically:

Then you remove the values you don't want in the menu, such as the column header (and quite possibly some previous spelling and capitalization inconsistencies too!):

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

That's all there is to it!

There's no keyboard shortcut to activate the menu such as they had in the old Numbers (I hope they'll add one) but the Pop-Up Menu approach has some advantages over autocompletion: no spelling inconsistencies 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 more efficient than activating a virtual keyboard and tapping the first few letters of items.

See this thread for other workarounds for features not included in Numbers 3.0.

SG

For navigation within a spreadsheet see the enormous list of keyboard shortcuts accessible via the Help menu.  A link to that page is here.  I get lost in it, but there don't seem to be many entries for 'tab' in there.  It seems the down arrow is the thing now, not quite as convenient.

SG