Animating text to expand

I thought this would be simple. I'm trying to animate a title so it spreads out over time. To clarify, the letters should get further apart, not stretch. In PPro 2018 this is the tracking parameter under "source text". It will accept values from 0 to 1000. I assumed that I could set the value at 0; create a keyframe, move 3 seconds down the timeline and create a keyframe with tracking value of 1000 and PPro would handle the in between, but NO. The text stays the same until the second keyframe it hit then tracking immediately jumps to the 1000.

Because I was on a deadline I created a keyframe at every frame and manually entered increasing tracking values. It worked but was very tedious and you can't change the font without changing EVERY key. This just won't do.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!