Suddenly cannot paste tab delimited text into Numbers correctly

I have several rows of tab-delimited text that is generated automatically (a process I have done weekly for over 10 years). The list contains only 16 fixed strings that never change, only the order of strings changes. Up until this week, I have been able to copy the tab-delimited text from a text editor (BBEdit) and paste it into the rows and columns in a Numbers document without issue. Today, suddenly, the entire list is copied into all of the selected cells. I cannot work out why.

One of the character strings has a space character in it. I deleted the space character and tried again. Lo and behold, the list formats correctly when pasted into Numbers (excluding the space character which I have to reinsert). But for over a decade, copying lists containing the exact same string worked without problem.

Did something change in a recent update OR is there a preference somewhere that has changed?

Completely baffled by this weird change in behavior.

iMac (2017 – 2020)

Posted on Mar 16, 2023 05:27 PM

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1 reply

Badunit

Level 7

29,886 points

Mar 16, 2023 07:27 PM in response to Greg Cunneen

Sounds baffling. I am so far unable to duplicate it. If nothing I write below is helpful, can you provide an example that fails to paste correctly for you, or a small snippet of your data that will fail?

It sounds like Numbers thinks it is one block of text, not tab-separated values. For example, if you copied the text "AAA" from BBEdit, selected a range of cells, and pasted, it would paste "AAA" into all the cells. That's what it appears to be doing with your data. I know that having different numbers of tabs in the rows will break the column tabular structure and the entire row of data will get pasted into each selected cell but the carriage returns still separate the data by rows.

On a side note, I find it best to select a single cell when pasting. It will paste the data into all the needed cells, creating some if necessary. If you select a range of cells then paste, you might get only part of your data (if you did not select enough cells) or the data might start repeating (if you selected too many).

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Suddenly cannot paste tab delimited text into Numbers correctly