Limitations

Current known limitations of numbers-parser which may be implemented in the future are:

  • Table styles that allow new tables to adopt a style across the whole table are not supported

  • Creating cells of type BulletedTextCell is not supported

  • New tables are inserted with a fixed offset below the last table in a worksheet which does not take into account title or caption size

  • Captions can be created and edited as of numbers-parser version 4.12, but cannot be styled. New captions adopt the first caption style available in the current document

  • Formulas cannot be written to a document

  • Pivot tables are unsupported and saving a document with a pivot table issues a UnsupportedWarning (see issue 73 for details).

  • Tables which have been saved grouped cannot be safely edited as references to written cells refer to the ungrouped cell rows rather than the row number in the groups.

The following limitations are expected to always remain:

  • New sheets insert tables with formats copied from the first table in the previous sheet rather than default table formats

  • Due to a limitation in Python’s ZipFile, Python versions older than 3.11 do not support image filenames with UTF-8 characters Cell.add_style.bg_image() returns None for such files and issues a RuntimeWarning (see issue 69 for details).

  • Password-encrypted documents cannot be opened. You must first re-save without a password to read (see issue 88 for details). A UnsupportedError exception is raised when such documents are opened.

  • Due to changes in the format of Numbers documents, decoding of category groups (introduced in numbers-parser version 4.16) is supported only for documents created by Numbers 12.0 and later. No warnings are issued for earlier Numbers documents.

  • Only standard macOS fonts are not supported. If a document includes a non-standard font, numbers-parser will issue a UnsupportedWarning and default styles to Helvetica Neue. Reading font names from the system would add additional system-specific dependencies to the package and so this is not planned to changed.