Excel data to InDesign table: straightforward?

[Charles Miller]

I’ve just made a preliminary bid on a job to bring paragraphs and phrases into 2 or more InDesign tables of 5 columns, 15 rows each.

I’ve brought in far less info, tab delimited, into InDy and don’t recall problems but may have had to comb out glitches. In this case, that might be a heck of a lot of combing.

I’m happy to learn from Adobe Help, plus tutorials, articles, other sources. Just wondering if I should expect the process to take more time and be tied to some problems.


Anyone have a bit of bottom line advice to offer?


Chuck M

[William Adams]

Depends on how complex the job and page layout is.

The first thing to do is to realize that you're handicapping yourself by using Excel --- it's a spreadsheet, not a database. Lots of potential issues which that may cause.

The second thing to realize is that InDesign does have a native feature for this which may or may not meet your needs.

I've brute-forced this sort of thing in the past by:

- working up a clean reflowable text layout and set of paragraph and character styles
- dumping that to tagged text
- dissecting the tagged text and pasting the formatting instructions into additional columns which I added to a copy of the Excel spreadsheet --- copy from that into a text editor, replace all tabs w/ nothing, search for all empty tagged text pairs (these were usually index entries, then save as text and import into InDesign

Alternately, for more complex jobs my boss imports the Excel into an Access database and then exports as either XTags or XML, depending on the needs of the job, based on a sample which I work up for him.

Or, you can use a commercial product, or a free one --- there've been some jobs we've done where it was the best option to save the Excel file out as a .csv and then use a package to bring that into LaTeX and process it there.

I'm pretty certain we've discussed this at length in the past --- if you'd like to go through the archives, digest what's there and post your take on it we could hash it out in even greater detail.

William

--
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

[Charles Miller]

On Apr 9, 2015, at 6:54 AM, William Adams <will....@frycomm.com> wrote:

Depends on how complex the job and page layout is.

Thank you for a (what’s a vegetarian word for meaty?) content-rich response. Sounds challenging. 

The potential client will have 50+ two-sided flyers to produce with this workflow. The prototype I produced (which they called great) isn’t complex, but it isn’t simple. For example, I don’t use plain, blah text. 

Further, the client is a not-for-profit with a very small budget. If I was a programmer, I could help them. As a designer, not so much. 

I suspect I will let this project float on down the river to another place. 

Chuck M

[Michael Brady]

Chuck

> (what’s a vegetarian word for meaty?)

Textured vegetable proteiny?
Tofuy?

[g]


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Michael Brady

[Charles Miller]

On Apr 11, 2015, at 9:46 AM, Michael Brady <mich...@michaelbradydesign.com> wrote:

(what’s a vegetarian word for meaty?)

Textured vegetable proteiny?
Tofuy?

Seems to make sense. Certainly works in the context it has here. 

I have a relationship with tofu. Friendly, appreciative, but not passionate. 

Perhaps I might prefer something stronger to show thanks for William.  ;-)

Chuck M

[C F Majors]

Black bean burgery ?

On the other question, I used datalinker to turn 300 some preset tables to typeset pages for a directory. Once I got the knack, it was beautimous. 

InData might have been my choice if buying today. 

Carol Majors 

publications unltd 

Raleigh NC

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[Michael Brady]

Carol wrote:
>
> Black bean burgery ?

Looks too much like a word with two g's.



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Michael Brady

[C F Majors]

<<g>>