To fill multiple spreadsheet cells with Typinator, you can create an expansion that consists of multiple lines with tab characters to separate cells. For example, you could create a simple expansion like this:
count 123 price 45.99
But when you type the corresponding abbreviation in a spreadsheet cell in Numbers or Excel, the expansion is inserted as a multi-line text item in a single cell:
The problem is that pasting in spreadsheet applications is handled in two different ways depending on the current selection: When you select a single cell, pasting replaces the range of cells that start here, but when there is an insertion point inside a cell, pasting affects the text in the cell. When you type an abbreviation, there is always an insertion point inside a cell, which leads to the unwanted result.
Fortunately, Typinator has a feature that allows you “escape” from a cell. To put an expansion in multiple rows and columns, insert the {esc} marker at the beginning of the expansion:
This simulates an esc keystroke, which reverts the change made to the current cell and selects the entire cell. Then the rest of the expansion gets pasted, which results in:
As an alternative, you could use separate return and tab keystrokes to jump from cell to cell as the expansion is processed. For example, the following expansion has a similar effect:
count{tab}123{return}price{tab}45.99{return}
The second techniques is more flexible, as it also allows you to insert other navigation keystrokes that move the selection to different parts of the table, such as {up} and {right}. As a downside, the expansion looks more complex, and it takes longer to process, since the cells must be filled one by one (whereas the previous technique fills them all at once with a single Paste operation).