What causes Numbers to pop this dialog (and how to stop it)?

AppleScript
#1

I have a Mail rules script that parses the contents of certain emails then populates a Numbers spreadsheet.

Alas, when Numbers populates a line it then also throws a dialog for each line saying it’s 'Downloading ’ with a progress bar (which never moves, but that’s by the by).

Screenshot 2021-07-22 at 14.53.35
Screenshot 2021-07-22 at 14.53.35908×1572 115 KB

Most annoyingly, there’s no way to dismiss these alerts via the keyboard (escape key doesn’t work) and I have to click each one individually, which is time-consuming and irritating. At times, there’s a couple of dozen of them to get rid of. I can’t automate getting rid of them either, because when asking Numbers for all windows it only sees the 1 window that is the sheet.

I would like to stop these alerts from popping up entirely; there is no content to download, the sheet lives on the local machine (Though it was once in iCloud; I moved it as I thought that might be the issue, but the nuisance persists).

The content does contain URLs, and I have unchecked the only pref I could find in Numbers (‘Paste Youtube and Vimeo links as web videos’ - this isn’t relevant anyway as the links are not media) to no avail.

I have used this script on other email content before without problem; that content did not contain URLs so I’m assuming it’s related to that somehow. However, since the URLs are essential to the content that I need to scrape, getting rid of them isn’t an option.

I don’t know why Numbers thinks it needs to download anything, or how to prevent it so at this point I’m out of ideas. Any suggestions/insights gratefully accepted.

#2

Just thinking…
Could you convert the urls in strings?
I mean, delete the scheme part (http & www).

1 Like
#3

What does the script look like?

#4

You need to show your code.

Conceptually your request simplifies and equates to something like:

set theURL to "https://www.apple.com/"

tell application "Numbers"
	set value of (cell "A1" of table 1 of sheet 1 of document 1) to theURL
end tell

and this seems to work OMM, without posting any such dialog.

Therefore there’s either something different about the data you’re handling, or there’s something different about the way you’re handling it. Neither of which can be solved blind.

#5

Andrew’s script works out-of-the-box for me with Numbers 10.1 (6913) on macOS 10.14.6 Mojave.

-Chris