Copy / Pasting From Excel

[Sean Scrivener]

I'm really frustrated with the tables in InDesign 2. I'd like to be able to copy, say, a column of cells in Excel and paste them into a column of cells in InDesign, and as far as I can see this is impossible! Please, please do something about this, because I believe this to be a huge problem for many and it's slowing down my work considerably, as I have to copy/paste in each cell individually!

Thanks and regards,
Sean

[Simon Warner]

Instead of (as well as) this, how about if we could import a range of
cells from the spreadsheet?

That would be useful.

Simon

[Thomas Ellefson]

I know it isn't a solid ID answer, but it might be a useful workaround until you get a good answer...paste the column of cells from excel into a new excel file, save it, and place that file in ID.

I'm new to ID so I may be off base here, but it's worth a try.

tye

[Ian A. Wright]

Sean:

If I understand you correctly you want just a small part of an existing spreadsheet to come into InDesign as a table. In that case, create a new worksheet and copy/paste special the format, then the contents of those cells into the new worksheet. Save it and Place that into your InDesign document. It works here.

Just like you, I and the other Users here don't work for Adobe. In fact I live thousands of kilometres away in another country. The advice you get here is from other Users, not Adobe.

You may be unaware that this is a User-to User forum where sometimes Adobe staff drop by but you're better off phoning or writing or leaving an e-mail at the Adobe web site to talk to the company: http://www.adobe.com/misc/comments.html <http://www.adobe.com/misc/comments.html> You might want to take advantage of this location to give your personal ideas of present functions as well as recommendations for the next version: http://www.adobe.com/support/feature.html <http://www.adobe.com/support/feature.html>

[M Blackburn]

Simon: You can import a range from Excel.

Ian: If I understand Sean correctly, what he wants to do is to import a range into a table that is already in InDesign — i.e. update/change the contents of a table with data from a spreadsheet. I can't see how to do it either.

[Sean Scrivener]

I tried writing a macro script but it's very bullshitty.
I've since found out that one cannot even copy/paste multiple cells within InDesign!
Stating the obvious here, but InDesign needs to be better than great if it's going to compete with the Big Q.

[Jens W Schulze]

To Sean again, ponited to his first post:

What about importing the entire raw table in Indesign and copy/paste from this table... same work as from Excel, you don't even have to switch the programms every half minute.

Jens

[Jens W Schulze]

To Simon:

With ID2 it's possible to import a range of the excel table, just check the import option box in the import dialogue.

Kind regards,
Jens

[Jens W Schulze]

To Sean:
T tried it a minute ago, with ID2 you can copy and paste multiple cells from one table to another, and during a job at work I pasted seveal blocks of cells (some merged) into another table, without problem. The job I mentioned was the first job I made with InDesign because it was a catalogue for electronic capacitors with lots of tables (imported from Excel), and I must say that ID2 prooved very well, far better than expected, so no need to hide from the overpriced Big Q.
And remember, ID is a DTP pogramm, not a spreadsheet programm: raw formating in Excel, and typographic fine tuning in ID2.

Kind regards,
Jens

[Sean Scrivener]

Ok, I've found the solution/problem! Very simple but not very obvious for people who use Excel a lot, because the technique is different. For those of you who want to know:
In Excel if you want to copy multiple cells for example to another location in that same table, you would highlight the cells you want to copy; but when you are pasting you need only highlight one cell, the very first cell.
However, in InDesign, if you want to paste in multiple cells, you must first highlight the same number of cells that you copied!
But this doesn't work when copy/pasting from Excel to InDesign and actually caused my version (2.0.1) to crash after a few times! I'm not worried, though, as the above solution has saved 99% of the time I would have wasted and i'm sure will be beneficial to many.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh...what a relief! :)

[M Blackburn]

Still, it would be nice if importing a range of cells with "Replace Selected Items" selected would actually replace the range selected.

It is my suspicion that this problem could be related to InDesign's inability to import anything but a table from Excel. I have posted my complaints about this before and hope Adobe takes this deficiency seriously and supplies a new import filter soon. Most of my imports are not from Word but from Excel — but I never use tables. In any large job I find I have to use PageMaker to import the Excel files then export to RTF for import into InDesign. It's a major pain that makes me wish for an alternative.

[Bob Levine]

>> In any large job I find I have to use PageMaker to import the Excel files
then export to RTF for import into InDesign. It's a major pain that makes me
wish for an alternative.<<<

Have you tried converting the table to text in ID?

Bob

[M Blackburn]

Yes. But it's only worth the effort if it's one table at a time and they aren't particularly large. Even in this simplest scenerio a table takes longer to come in than text, having to then put a text cursor into the table and select change to text from a menu (although I have a quick key set up for that) is just cumbersome and time consuming. Try importing 50 such files at a time. Now try importing those 50 files and append each to the end of the previous.

Really I'm just getting started, but the point is that it's not just easier to use PageMaker in my situation, it is necessary.

[Bob Levine]

Just asking. :)

FWIW, I agree that there should be a paste special. There's always hope for
ID 3.0.

Bob

[M Blackburn]

Why should it need a whole version update? Before v.2.0 added tables it was the only thing InDesign could do.

Just one little radio button on the Excel Import Options palette, right above Apply Default Spreadsheet Style.

[ ] Import as text.

[Bob Levine]

Its a good question. Unfortunately I'm not a software engineer so I can't
answer it. :(

Bob

[Ian A. Wright]

M:

Your suggestion might be worthwhile posted in the new InDesign Feature Requests Forum. It might receive more notice over there.

[Diane Banks]

I am also frustrated by the inability to paste a range of cells into an already formatted InDesign table. The only way I have been able to do so is to copy the Excel cells, paste into InDesign, then copy the cells from that table into my pre-formatted table. It's an extra step and not efficient. I used to use Adobe tables (PageMaker)and create a master table, then easily copy Excel cells into the table. I could use the same table design for multiple tables and paste the data quickly.

[George Bilalis]

Hi all,

Can anyone inform me, if this can be done in Quark?

regards
George

[Steve Werner]

Quark can't even import Excel spreadsheet data. You have to (1) export from Excel as tab delimited text. Then (2) choose File > Get Text to place the tab delimited text. Then (3) choose Text to Table (or whatever the name of the command is) to make the tab delimited text into a table. Not exactly efficient!

[George Bilalis]

Yes Steve,

that's right. I asked only to make a point. I see a lot of complains here, but... We are doing a weekly economic newspaper including 12 tabloid pages full of stock exchange data. The huge tables (I mean huge) are comming from agencies in Excel files, we have to filter and rearrange some data, like transpose some columns, redefine some labels, change weight for grid lines, adjust column width and row height. All these are done in Visual Basic acting on the Excel sheets and finally placed in InDesign 2.0, where there is almost nothing left to be done. This is a great time saver. InDesign 2.0 is so tremendously accurate in interpreting Excel that makes possible to finish in 1 hour this monstrous job.
It's the first time, as far as I know that anyone (but Adobe) has made such a feature available. InDesign 2.0 is handling Excel tables even better than Excel itself. For example cellular text is hyphenated correctly in any language, where Excel can only wrap randomly. Absolutely fantastic.
Compare this to what InDesign 1.5 was thinking about tables as tab text.
Quark is bitting the dust here.

George

[George Bilalis]

To Sean,

Have you tried the update links function, updating the link to your Excel file?

Regards
George

[Steve Werner]

George,

I'm agreeing with you! InDesign's table feature (including the ability to import Excel tables) is quite amazing. Not that it can't be improved, but it's definitely a jump ahead of the competition.