Why do I mess Numbers' Applescript sort command up?

[parrotbird]

Hi,

I’m trying to understand how Numbers’ AppleScript sort command works

Given a simple, headerless table containing only integers:

This works as expected and sorts the table by column A:

tell table 1
sort by column 1 direction descending
end tell

However, limiting the sort to a subset of rows;
tell table 1
sort (rows 1 thru 3) by column 1 direction descending
end tell

consistently produces: error -1728: Can’t get column 1 of table 1

Getting column 1 of table 1 wasnt a problem when sorting the full table, so I am wondering what the problem might be, when sorting only parts of it.

Thx in advance
macOS: Tahoe 26.1
Numbers: Version 14.4 (7043.0.93)

[peavine]

@parrotbird

I’m trying to understand how Numbers’ AppleScript sort command works

Given a simple, headerless table containing only integers:

This works as expected and sorts the table by column A:

parrotbird. The following worked on my Tahoe computer.

tell application "Numbers" to tell table 1 of sheet 1 of document 1
	sort by column "1" direction ascending in rows range "2:3"
end tell

Just to clarify what this does, the following are spreadsheets before and after the sort:

BTW, the Numbers AppleScript dictionary states that the sort command sorts the rows of a table. I was curious if it’s possible to sort a range of cells of a table (and only those cells), and I couldn’t find a way to do that.