Pasting multiple columns into Numbers

schl3ck · September 4, 2020, 5:36pm

Hi,

I have a spreadsheet in Numbers where I write down all my purchases from the AppStore. I have already a Scriptable script that fetches the apps name and current price and copies it into the clipboard in the format {name}\t{price} where \t is the tab character. I’ve then pasted it manually into the spreadsheet and it separated it into two columns.

Some long time ago (more than a year probably) the pasting has stopped working. It now pastes the text into one cell. When I select both cells, it does the exact same thing: pasting the whole thing into both cells.

So my question is: Is there any way to paste the data, so that the name is in one column and the price in the other?

ThatNerd · September 5, 2020, 5:53pm

have you tried CSV format?

schl3ck · September 5, 2020, 7:06pm

Thanks for the suggestion, but sadly it too doesn’t work.

ThatNerd · September 5, 2020, 10:16pm

A couple more suggestions:

Import, not paste, csv?
Append to file using Shortcuts?

schl3ck · September 6, 2020, 7:44am

You mean opening a CSV file with numbers? That creates a new file instead of inserting it into the desired spreadsheet.
That apparently does nothing…

Thank you for taking your time to help!

I’ve copied one line from numbers and looked at the format. It is exactly like my first try: {name}\t{price}.

sylumer · September 6, 2020, 9:35am

The outlook is less than stellar:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8428305

schl3ck · September 6, 2020, 10:54am

Oh. Well, thanks anyway.

I will experiment with it a bit. I will report back when I find something useful.

ThatNerd · September 6, 2020, 5:34pm

Oof. Oh well. Sorry I couldn’t help

schl3ck · September 9, 2020, 10:15am

So I’ve found out that plain text doesn’t work, but rich text does. So this works:

The only thing is that it also pastes the format of the text so it will probably look a little odd, but it is separated into columns as it should be!

ThatNerd · September 9, 2020, 9:36pm

Nice! Glad you finally got this working

Calion · January 24, 2025, 9:42pm

Another way, suggested at the link above, is to replace tabs with newlines, paste into a throwaway Numbers table, select the table, choose Table Actions…>Transpose, then copy and paste the result where you want.