Using Apple Numbers, I often want to drop a future date into a cell for assignment due dates for example and I'd much prefer to use a date picker. I feel that I should just be able to right-click in the cell and choose "Date Picker" and boom, a little calendar pops up. Loads of applications work this way.
Numbers indeed has a date picker, but you have to jump through a few hoops to get there.
Click in cell where you want a date
Go to the menu item Insert / Date & Time to insert today's date & time
Click on the date in the cell and a window will pop up that allows you to format the date. It also has the date picker. If you are editing a cell where you a previously inserted a date, you will have to click a few times to get to the window to appear. One click to select the cell, another to select the date the cell, and a third to get the window to appear.
Click on the date picker icon in the window to open the date picker.
You can use the date picker on cells where you used Insert Date & Time (or copy/pasted one) but apparently not on cells where you have typed a date yourself.
I have crafted up a solution with Keyboard Maestro triggered by a hotkey but sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it finds the calendar button to click and sometimes it doesn't
I'm sure someone has a more elegant solution than mine but my goal is to get the date picker as quickly as possible with no friction points.
I like to use a trackpad gesture for this so I used BetterTouchTool but the idea is the same and can likely be set up in Keyboard Maestro. Instead of giving the code I will describe each step.
Double click in the cell
Send Command-A (to select all text - if replacing a date this is necessary - if the cell is blank then it does nothing)
Pause for about .5 seconds (play around with this)
Left click (Not sure why this is necessary but if makes the rest of the code work - Keyboard Maestro may be different)
Choose menu bar item "Insert;Date & Time" (I think Keyboard Maestro uses a different format if I remember right - actually I think you can actually choose the menu bar item from within Keyboard Maestro)
Pause again for a bit
Press tab key twice (to get to the date chooser button (probably the same one that is in the "Move and Click from the Center of the Found Image" in the code above)
Press spacebar to activate the button (brings up the date picker)
**The original double click is to get into text entry mode in the cell. In the newest version of Numbers the Menu Item to choose Date & Time is grayed out until you are in editing mode
Here is a GIF of my Keyboard Maestro macro in action.
I click in the cell to get the text cursor, then activate the macro by pressing ⌃⌥⇧D, and the date picker appears in a couple of seconds. As I say, this isn't elegant, but it works until Apple's engineers implement the date picker in a more user-friendly manner.
Numbers doesn't because the data picker is "attached" to the date object in the cell, not the cell itself. You can see this by adding some text before your inserted date -- the cell will have a data format of text but you can still pop the calendar picker by clicking on the date object:
What you might want to try is the AppleScript in the top-ranking reply of this thread (and given that our own @ccstone and @CJK were involved it might even be somewhere on this Forum...). It pops a separate Date & Time picker:
...which lets you add your chosen timestamp directly to the selected cell.
Thanks for sharing. I never clued in to the fact that the date picker was attached to the actual date object and not the cell. I'd like to see Apple add a "Date Picker" cell style. The current implementation requires too many clicks in my opinion to get to the date picker.
I figured out why my macro would sometimes fail. The reason was I was clicking into the cell but didn't have the text cursor present before initiating the macro. It was a "PEBKAC" error. (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair")
I'll likely stick with my Keyboard Maestro solution as it's fast and reliable, and has been working well for me.
