Using Shortcuts To Add Data To a Numbers Spreadsheet

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use Numbers and Shortcuts together on your Mac to easily record data. 

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Now sometimes you want to create a spreadsheet where you want to easily record data. Maybe you want to put just the date and time into a spreadsheet or maybe add some additional information and you don't want to have to open the spreadsheet and then type it all out yourself. Well the latest version of macOS Monterey there's some added functionality in Shortcuts that lets you do this.

So first let's create a Numbers spreadsheet to hold this data. I'll just start with a blank template here. I'll put Date/Time for the first column and Event for the second column. Then I'll get rid of all the additional columns. Maybe lengthen this column a little bit right there. There's no data in this now so I'll shrink this a much as I can. I have to have at least one row in here that's not a Header row so I'll just leave that blank. Let's name everything properly. I could leave the name as Sheet 1 and Table 1 but let's actually give them proper names. I'm just going to double click in here and call this Data. Maybe this is the data sheet and you have other sheets that show reports and things. The Table here let's just call that Events. So let's Save the document and I'm going to call it Record Events and just put it on my Desktop. You should probably put it somewhere in your Documents folder. But I'll put it on the Desktop so we can easily see it here during this tutorial. So I've saved that. 

So now what will be nice if I could trigger a shortcut to actually fill in a date and time and an event. Let's Hide Numbers here for now. We could see the file there. Let's launch the Shortcut App. I'll create a new shortcut. Let's call it Record Event into Spreadsheet. I'm going to search over here, under Apps, for Numbers. Here I can find three actions that pertain to Numbers. So we've got one here called Add Row to Top or Bottom of a Table. That's exactly what we want. We don't need to create or open the spreadsheet in advance. We can just go right to this. I'm going to double-click it to add it. Now we've got Add Values to the Bottom, we can do bottom or top, and then we define a Table, Sheet, and Document. Let's work backwards here. I'll click here and select that document. Great. The sheet name remember was Data. The Table name was Events. We do want to add to the bottom and then what do we want to add. Well, we want to add the date. So let's go and search for Date here, and there is an action for getting the current date. Let's move that above here and it gets the current date. If we wanted to we can Format the date. Let's put Format underneath, Show More, and we can select the date and time format. 

Now let's click here and I'm going to actually Control Click in here and do Insert  Variable, Select Variable, and Select the Result of the Formatted Date. So it takes the current date and time, formats it like we want, and then is going to use that in what it adds to the table. Now there's also a Plus here that allows us to add more data. So this will add one cell. We can use this here to add another cell and continue going. But let's test this out first. So I'm going to go to Settings here and I'm going to Pin this in the Menu Bar. So now we see it right here. Now I can actually quit Shortcuts and if I were to run this it's going to open up the Spreadsheet and sure enough it's going to put the date in that format right here and nothing for Event because we're only adding that one cell of information here. The first time we do this we're going to end up with a blank line because we had to have a blank line here in order to keep the table there. So now we can get rid of that. Now anytime we use this again, whether the spreadsheet is opened or not, it's going to open it and then add something new to it. 

Now what would be nice is if we can actually record an event as well. So to do that what we want to do is search for Choose and there's Choose from List. Let's add that to the beginning here. Now we need a list of items. So I'll search for List and let's add List up above. So first define the List. Let's define a bunch of events here. I'll just create some sample ones. This creates the List. We see it says Choose From and it automatically selects the List so it was right before it. If not we could have clicked here and selected List as the Input. Now we get that data here. We want to add it here. So where did that Plus button go? Unfortunately that Plus button is gone. I'm going to Control Click on it and clear that out. Click again to Add Values. The first value I want Insert Variable, Select, and get the formatted Date. Now that Plus button is back. Click that, Control Click, Insert Variable, select variable and get the chosen item here. 

So now what you get is two things to that row, formatted date and the chosen item. So I'll Quit Shortcuts and I'll run it again. You could see it comes up with this nice list. I can select one and click Done or just double-click that item. It will open up the spreadsheet and Add that here. So you can add one or many more items to a spreadsheet row always creating a new row there. It would be nice if it didn't leave us sitting here in Numbers. You can kind of add that to the shortcut. If I Search for Quit, I can do Quit App, Choose the App, search for Numbers. What I find is that it doesn't quite work unless you add a wait, because it is still working on this when it tries to execute that and so it won't quit. So you have to wait for say three seconds here. Which gives us time to review the entry. So now if I wanted to add an event I could trigger it like that. Select one. You could see it adds it there and a few seconds later it Quits Numbers. 

So you could probably see all sorts of uses for this. You can record all sorts of data into a table in a spreadsheet and the spreadsheet doesn't just have to be that table. It could be a complex spreadsheet. You're just adding a row to a single table in that spreadsheet. You can add extra things. You can have several lists here. You can ask for input right here where you ask for a value that you can enter. So you can have an item for sale, the amount sold, the total price, a prompt for all of that. It automatically puts the date and records that all on the line in a spreadsheet. 

Now while those actions are new to Shortcuts for awhile we've been able to use Scripting to add or modify data in a spreadsheet. So there's no way to use those actions to change the value of a cell. But you could use the same scripting that you would have used before in Shortcuts or even before Shortcuts existed in Automator to change the value in a cell. So, for instance, let's start off a new Shortcut here by opening the spreadsheet and we will choose that same spreadsheet right here. Let's go and say we want to change the value of a specific cell. There's nothing here that allows you to do that. But if we use a bit of JAVA script for automation we can. So here's the script. First we define the application. a little Link to the application to variable Numbers will link to application Numbers. Then a link to the Table inside of the document. So we do Numbers.documents and then the name of the document. Then we do .sheets, the name of the sheet and .tables and the name of the table. Then we get a link to the cell. So we take the table.cells and then cell B2 so specifying cell B2. Then we take that cell and set its value to something. So this could be something we choose from a list like in the script before. If I open the spreadsheet so we can see it here below here is cell B2. Then if we run this we can see it changes the value of cell B2.

So by using scripts like this you can actually change values in existing spreadsheets rather than simply adding new rows. You can expand on that to do all sorts of different things with Shortcuts and Numbers. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.