In the Finder window, select all the files you want to copy, and Copy (Command + C.)
If you go to Numbers spreadsheet directly and try to Paste the content of the clipboard, it might work, or it might not work. Depending on the file, it will paste the content of the file instead of the names of the files, which is what we want.
For some reason it works with this list of pdfs:
But sometimes it does not work with other files, even pdfs. In other apps, we could use "Paste Special / Paste as Text" or something similar. No such function in Numbers - Hmm, hmm, hello Apple?
So we have to use a workaround with TexEdit:
Open Textedit, create a new document, then select Format / Make Plain Text. Paste the clipboard (Command+V) and the list of names appears.
Copy the list of names from the TexEdit document, and paste it into Numbers, this time it works! The list of names is being copied as text, as we intended.
