Some of you may remember a post from a few months ago in which I used Drafts and Pythonista to make a simple text-based expense report. I could do the whole thing on my phone, though, because Numbers allows you email the spreadsheet as a PDF.
#IWORK NUMBERS TEMPLATES PDF#
That’s also when I create a PDF of the report to attach to the invoice.
#IWORK NUMBERS TEMPLATES MAC#
The report itself is shared via iCloud, so I typically do the last few entries (airport parking and mileage for the drive home) on my Mac when the trip is over. I used to email the scanned receipts to myself and put the report together when I got home, but now I start a report on my phone right away and add entries and receipts as I go.
#IWORK NUMBERS TEMPLATES PRO#
So now I scan my receipts on my phone (with JotNot Pro when I’m on the road) and add them to an expense report in Numbers. Since my invoices are sent by email, my expense reports-including the receipts-must be in a digital format that can be read by anyone. If I don’t include copies of my expense reports with my invoice (not just line items on the invoice-the actual report with receipts), they’ll use that as an excuse to delay payment. I’ve noticed a disturbing trend among my clients. I’d come back from a business trip with a bunch of receipts, generate the report, staple the receipts to it, and give it to the company bookkeeper. Time was when I could just type up a simple text file and have a Perl/troff script format it into a nice report. Although I really don’t like the idea of doing my expenses in Numbers, it’s the path of least resistance for the reports I need to generate now. So why did I want a Numbers template on my phone? Expense reports. Either way, I think I’ll use the email method the next time I need to move a template. I don’t know whether the slow sync is because of iCloud itself or because I was using an unsupported method to move a file (people have been using the Mobile Documents trick for a while to get at their Photo Stream, but I don’t think Apple approves). After waiting way too long to see the file show up on my phone, I was annoyed to find that I had one more step to take, even though that step was short. The second issue wouldn’t bother me if it weren’t for the first. It’s only when you tap to open it that you get a chance to save it as a template. When it finally arrives on your phone, it’s in the list of regular files, but with a ruler along the bottom of the icon. The template doesn’t start out as a template file. This may be unique to my setup, and because it’s iCloud, the alignment of the planets may have played a role, but if you want to move a template over and get started working on it right away, the email method is faster. It took more than an hour for the template file to sync to my phone. I’ve tried this, and it does work, but there are two things I don’t like about it: It’ll be in the My Templates sections, way down at the bottom of the template selection Alt: copy template to ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~Numbers/Documents/ and open it directly in iOS Numbers. Tap the Add button and your template will be on your iOS device, ready to go. When you do, Numbers will launch and you’ll see a screen that looks like this: Somewhere on the sheet will be a choice to open it in Numbers. You’ll get the usual sheet asking you what you want to do with it. Open the email on your phone or iPad and tap the attachment. Select the one you want on your iOS device and attach it to an email to yourself. Open that package and work your way through the subfolders like this: Now there’s a package named in your ~/Library/Containers folder. They used to be in ~/Library/Application Support/iWork/Numbers/Templates, but that’s been changed.
You have to copy them over.įirst, you have to find templates on your Mac. New or altered templates that you make on your Mac don’t automatically propagate to your iPhone or iPad. 1 Although the Mac and iOS versions of Numbers come with the same set of templates, they aren’t shared. You might think that with the new Numbers, your templates would be stored in iCloud and just automatically available on every device. Say you have a Numbers template file on your Mac and you want to use it on your iPhone. I’ll get to the motivations for this post later let’s cut to the chase. Next post Previous post Copying Numbers templates to iOS