Why is Pages autocompleting / autocorrecting entries in my table? Why is this unwanted feature stealing my tab key?

Question

I am using Pages 6.2 on macOS 10.12.5. Within Pages settings, Auto-Correction > Correct Spelling Automatically is disabled. I unchecked the Edit > Spelling and Grammar > Check Spelling While Typing menu item. I unchecked the Edit > Substitutions > Text Replacement menu item. Within System Preferences, Keyboard > Text > Correct spelling automatically is disabled. Within Pages, if I select my document's table, open the Format pane on the right, and select Table, I don't see any options regarding spelling correction or autocompletion.

My Pages document consists of a table, with column A consisting of a list of languages, and columns B-K containing translations of the cardinal numbers zero through nine in that row's language. So this is a multi-lingual document, and any suggestions for spelling correction or text substitution are likely to be wrong, and are unwanted.

Let's say I go to row 8 (8A contains "Czech"), column B, and type zer, assuming that this is the exact text that I want to appear there. I see a popup below this cell containing two values: "zéro", "zero". I want neither of these. What key do I press to dismiss the popup? If I press Esc, sometimes the cell is cleared and sometimes my entered text remains as intended. If I press tab, instead of advancing to the next cell, a selection row appears within the unwanted completion suggestions popup. I can click on the next cell (8C), however I should be able to complete my entry without using the mouse. After all, I disabled "Correct spelling automatically" in both applicable locations.

I've found that I can press the right arrow key, then tab, to advance to the next cell without any autocompletion. However, this seems like more work than necessary given that I've disabled all autocomplete options that I can find. Since I am editing over 550 cells in this document alone, I want to do this as efficiently as possible.

I also did a quick test of Numbers 4.2, and I experience the same problem with unwanted completion suggestions appearing in a popup below the cell that must be interacted with before the Tab key will advance to the next cell.

Answer 1

Currently my best solution is to use the right arrow key to dismiss the autocomplete popup and advance to the next cell. However sometimes it requires one press, sometimes two. This is too inconsistent.

Answer 2

Pages, Numbers, and Excel (untested in Word) all have this feature; what it does is look through that column of the table and, if there are any cells with the same starting letters as what you've typed in, will suggest them. This has nothing to do with autocorrect and everything to do with how accountants use tables, which seems to be the target audience of this feature (stupid as it may be, particularly so since it can't be disabled AFAICT).

One thing to note is that without some prompt to actually fill in the prompt, it will not actually fill it in. So, if you're up to ten and have previously typed in two and three, it will prompt you with those latter numbers as soon as you've typed t, but will quickly dismiss them once you add the e. It will also dismiss the prompt if what you've typed is identical (disregarding any accents) to what is contained in the prompt; for instance, typing in zéro when prompted with zero.

If you really want to get rid of it immediately, there's several things you can try, like using the left and right arrow keys (as you've already discovered), or adding a random character that doesn't continue the sequence in any cell in that column. The problem with this approach is when you want to continue, and there's more than one or two common letters among them. For instance, if you type in three and you've previously done the higher numbers, which include three hundred, you can't just do it once and be done with it; the table will prompt you on every character. For this reason I recommend this approach only if what you want to write is entirely contained within another cell, but not identical to it, and you've finished with your current cell.