Mac software
Numbers lost in translation
Resolving riddles and restrictions with what you want to run on your Mac
by TOM BARNES
Q When I copy and paste spreadsheet data between Numbers, Microsoft Excel and third-party apps, much of the time it works well, but sometimes goes wrong, most often when handling dates. How can I make it more reliable?
A Although macOS and apps have specific data types to represent different types of number, including time and dates, when you copy and paste most numeric data, including from spreadsheets, the contents of the cells are transferred as plain Unicode text. To enable that, the app which you’re copying from converts numbers, times and dates into text separated by tabs – it doesn’t even use Comma-Separated Value (CSV) format – which is placed in the