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 suppported

  • 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).

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.