Where has text auto complete gone in new numbers

Question

Before I upgraded to new Numbers yesterday 24/10/2013 it was possible to have auto complete suggest words
previously typed in cells. This feature does not seem to exist in the latest version of numbers
Can anyone help... thanks

Answer 1

Hi enuenu,
Apple seems to be actively developing iWorks apps again after a long hiatus. The big push has been to make the apps work well with both Macs and iOS devices, something that MS has not been able to match. The tradeoff so far has been elimination of some features that are hard to implement in iOS. Apple has announced in this support document that auto-complete and several other features will be reintroduced, however.
But even after "auto-complete" is brought back you might want to consider formatting the cells in the column as Pop-Up Menu if you frequently enter repeating values in a column and don't want to type the same text over and over again.
In many situations, particularly if you want to avoid typos or capitalization inconsistencies creeping in and messing up your data, Pop-Up Menu is better than "auto-complete." It is much enhanced over what it was in Numbers 2.3, and is easy to set up:
Select the whole column or range before formatting as Pop-Up Menu and your existing values in that column or range will pre-populate a menu automatically:
Then you can remove the values you don't want in the list, such as the column header (and possibly some previous spelling errors too!):
And after this easy one-time setup all you have to do thereafter is to choose from the pop-up list when you add rows:
See this post for more details on how this handy feature has been enhanced in Numbers 3.0.
If you want to use Numbers on an iPad or iPhone, in a touch interface pop-ups are far more efficient than typing the first few letters of items. You can scroll with ease through a list of dozens of items to make a pick. Anybody using Numbers cross-platform should favor Pop-Up so they can use their documents efficiently for data input on the go, which can be a productivity booster.
Also, auto-complete is not as good a choice as Pop-Up Menu even for keyboard-intensive work on the Mac if you've got numerous hard-to-spell values, particularly if some are capitalized and some not, where the capitalization can be significant. The Pop-Up Menu approach, unlike auto-complete, eliminates spelling inconsistencies or lack of capitalization when there should be capitalization, etc.
See this thread for this and other workarounds for Numbers 3.0.
SG