How Autocomplete in Numbers Works

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at how Text Autocomplete works in Numbers.

MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.

Now if you've ever tried to enter text into Numbers you may have noticed that sometimes Numbers wants to Autocomplete what you're typing. For instance, let's say I want to add a row here. So I'll add a date, and then I'll start typing something right here. I'll start with the letter S and notice how it wants to Autocomplete to supplies. If I were to click Supplies right there it fills the rest in without me having to type. But if I were to type a letter like say A notice how it doesn't try to Autocomplete to anything. I have to type the entire word out like that. Now it is fairly easy to see here because I only have a few items in this table. But if you have a lot of them you may be confused as to why sometimes it wants to allow you to Autocomplete and sometimes it doesn't 

You may have noticed that it is autocompleting based on previous entries in that column. It's just in that column. So if I were to start typing here with an M you can see Marketing appears as something that I could Autocomplete. But, if I go to this column here and type M nothing happens. There's nothing here in this column to Autocomplete  things. So all it is simply doing is looking for previous entries here and then allowing you to easily type them again in the same column. It's for exactly this kind of situation that it is built. When you have categories here and you're going to be reusing a lot of them over and over again. 

On the other hand sometimes if I start to type nothing will happen like that because there is nothing that matches that letter there. But if I continue to type you'll see it makes suggestions, like that. That looks similar but what it is actually doing there, that's just regular Autocorrect. So you start typing something and you haven't completed the word and it is trying to figure out what it is you're trying to spell. That is the same Autocorrect that you would get in other apps like Pages, Messages, or Mail. 

If you have two that start with the same letter then if you type the first letter notice you get both of those there. If you type a second letter it has narrowed it down so there is only one. You don't have to lift your hands off the keyboard and use the pointer to click either. You can use the down arrow key to go to the first entry and continue to down arrow if there are multiple entries. So if we go back here to the situation where you only typed one letter and there are two possible matches I can go down with two presses of the arrow key and then Return to select this. Likewise I can press the Tab key to go to the next one and then Return and it accepts it. I need to use Return again to go to the next cell if I want to continue entering in more data. Although normally I would press Tab at this point to go over one column so I can actually enter an amount in this case. 

A lot of times people discover how this Autocomplete feature works when they make a mistake. For instance if they misspell something or just do something like, maybe, two capital letters that appear like that and now they find when they type the first letter there they get both of these. If that's the case and say you've got not just six rows here but you've got hundreds of rows and you find that there is a misspelling in there it is simply because you've misspelled it somewhere else in that column. So it is just a matter of finding it and making a correction. You could see if I go in here and make the correction now the misspelling won't appear. 

A lot of times people ask me how they can do Pop-Up menus that are dynamic. In other words instead of having to type a category here they can go to Format, Cell, choose the Pop-Up Menu as a cell type, and then enter in data here like each possible item that could appear in this column. That will work. You can now select from  these. But if you then want to go and add something new to it like a new category in this case I would have to go back to the cell formatting and add it. Not just add it to this one but add it to all of the existing cells. So it can get really messy and you have to keep updating this. Whereas if instead of using Pop-Ups you go ahead and just keep adding new categories here. Then after the very first time you type it the next time you can very easily go and use the Autocomplete function. 

So it kind of works like a Pop-Up but it is extremely dynamic. With a Pop-Up you can't go and choose some other value. You've got to go and change the Pop-Up menu. But with this you can simply type whatever you want. If you want to choose an existing value though it is just as easy as using the Pop-Up. Also, Autocomplete doesn't work with numbers. It only works with text values. So if I start typing a number here it is not going to Autocomplete for the number. It only does that for text and I have no text in this column here so I can't really use it there. I can only use it right here to easily reuse text that I've already put in another cell. 

Also, I should mention that if for some reason you want to turn this Off you can go into Numbers and then Settings and then under General there's a checkmark here under Editing for Show Suggestions When Editing Table Cells. So I hope this makes it easier for you to enter in data in your Numbers spreadsheets. Thanks for watching.