In the government computer contracting game, there’s an old industry story about a military RFP issued for a creation of a new model computer according to the detailed specifications of the contracting customer (back in the days before standardized computing platforms emerged). One of the requirements was for each word to have a special bit called the “indirect bit,” which, when set, would cause any reference to that word to instead automatically indirect to the address contained in that word. It was apparently quite an effort to get the point across to the contracting officer that this was a mortal design flaw, since once that bit was set, it could never be unset.
As humorous as this story is, I fear Apple may have stepped into exactly this pit. I’m editing a spreadsheet with the current Numbers (3.2.2). I began entering proposed domain names in various cells. When I leave each cell, Numbers detects that it looks like a domain name, and automatically makes a hyperlink out of it. (I didn’t ask it to, but whatever.) Now I need to revise several of these cells... and I can’t do it! Every time I click on the text, I get swept away to a nonexistent website. The hyperlinked text is the ONLY text in the cell, so I can’t click somewhere fore or aft of it and then arrow into it. I can’t click either end of it, because I either hit it and go on a trip, or I don’t get an I-beam cursor. None of the modifier keys do anything useful. The contents of the cell appear in a status line at the bottom of the window, but (unlike Excel) you can’t edit in that line. The help facility tells you only how to create a hyperlink (“set the indirect bit”)—not how to edit or clear one. A Google search comes up with an Apple document advising me to "Deactivate hyperlinks so that they can be edited without activating the link… Click Inspector in the toolbar, click the Hyperlink inspector button, select 'Make all hyperlinks inactive', edit the text, and then reactivate the link.” Unfortunately, that advice is for Numbers ’09—the current Numbers has no such control I can find, anywhere; not in the inspector, not in preferences, not in a contextual menu. (I’ve found and used this control in Pages, but it’s not in Numbers.) About the only thing I can do is control-click on the cell, choose “Cut,” and retype new contents. Not difficult, but an unpleasant surrender to vendor brain-damage. Does anybody know how one is supposed to achieve this?
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