Automating apple Numbers sheets on macOS and iOS

iOS
1

I’m not a complete geek, but nor am I a total neophyte. I’ve written a set of AppleScripts that I use to update numbers spreadsheets (obviously on the Mac) with my solar inverter power downloads and electricity providers input/output data. Since both types of file are very raw, they need quite a bit of manipulation first and applescript works really well for me.

I can see and update (manually) those spreadsheets on my iPad, but I’d love to be able to run the updates from file there too. Clearly applescript won’t work for me. I’ve tried Scriptable, but AFAIK that lacks spreadsheet access (node.js??); Apple shortcuts is a complete non-starter for this - IMHO, it’s simply not designed for this type of thing (and believe it or not, I find it less intuitive than AppleScript!!). I guess I could run the scripts over ssh from the iPad, but that’s not really the point. I suppose I could ditch Numbers in favour of Google sheets, but I’m already invested in Numbers. I started down this track because my mac is getting long in the tooth and I was thinking about a replacement with iPad.

So the question is …..how would one best go about automating a Numbers spreadsheet update from file on iOS?

2

There’s a way that you can do it with Shortcuts and using some PDF actions, because believe it or not, Shortcuts doesn’t natively read Numbers files :person_facepalming:t2: I mention this less as a solution and more as a complaint.

3

Thanks. I spent a couple of days with shortcuts but it’s such ridiculously hard going. I got to the point of being able to create a json ‘record’ (probably the wrong terminology) from a text file but to get that to write to an new line in a table was doing my little head in. ( I did however find a thing called Sheetbox that can READ nicely from Numbers and WRITE to google sheets - if you’re interested). But again, I just think shortcuts isn’t the right approach - a bit like trying to eat tomato soup with a set of chopsticks.