12-11-2009, 02:34 AM

Using Numbers '09.

Need to update an 8-column table with data on a regular basis.

I've written a Perl script to parse the raw data into a tab-delimited file with 6-columns. I then open the file in Numbers, which gives me a usable table.

I want to add this table to the 8-column table. I attempt to cut and paste but, although the data is dumped, two things are making this awkward:

1) the new rows have no formatting,
2) the new columns have no calculations.

My questions:

1) how do I enforce all new rows to continue with the same formatting as existing rows (or is that even possible)?
2) how do I copy calculations into new columns? Cutting and pasting from existing cells with formulas to new cells without fails ("beep") for no apparent reason.

Confused...

12-11-2009, 03:09 AM

Inspiration struck, but not from the side I was expecting. I was so frustrated attempting to find a way to expand this table from within Numbers that I realized I could attempt to fake it out at the command line level...

For the sake of sharing, I simply added two extra print statements to the Perl script which are formulas. They're nothing complex or secretive so here's how it appears:

  print WH "=IF(ISERROR((F$row)-(C$row)),0,F$row-C$row)";
  print WH "\t";

  print WH "=SUM(\$F\$1:\$F\$$row)-SUM(\$C\$1:\$C\$$row)";
  print WH "\n";

Open the table and, poof, all the calculations are there and the results are properly interpreted. If there is a more elegant solution from within Numbers, I'd love to hear it.

The question on adding rows to an existing table that continue the formatting of each column still stands.