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• • April 13, 2010 at 4:08 am #55496
    Scott Fawcett

    Member

    Having long been perplexed by an Excel to InDesign problem I thought I’d drop you a note with, if not a complete solution, at least a very simple workaround.

    The problem is as follows. When I create a chart in Excel (on the Mac) and use “Save As Picture…”, to export it as a PDF, the file created cannot be placed into InDesign (“Failed to open the PDF file” error). Often I use Acrobat to optimize the file, which can then be placed, but sometimes even that won’t work – and it degrades the drop shadows in any event.

    I’ve finally worked out what is apparently causing this glitch. The standard fill for the Excel charts has a slight colour blend from light to dark. Simply by changing the chart style to one that uses a single colour seems to reliably produce a pdf that can be placed into a frame.

    Hope this helps someone!

  • April 13, 2010 at 9:39 am #55502
    Bob Levine

    Participant

    You might want to try copy/pasting to Illustrator. From there you can tweak just about anything, save as PDF or AI and place that into InDesign.

  • January 30, 2013 at 2:46 pm #64038
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I have this same problem. It is obviously excel. Acrobat gives the error “Number out of Range” when you try to Save as… It actually only happens with Excel-generated PDFs in my case when there is a text box over the chart (i.e., identifying a line). If you use a legend, this problem dose not occur. Unfortunately, the legend in Excel is very limited. (The whole office for mac version is a joke actually. This isn't even a problem in the Windows version. Why should consumers suffer due to a war betwen monopolists?)

    The fix is to open the PDF in Illustrator and delete the very last layer—why, as you'll see, is just out of the bounding box. It is ridiculous that Excel doesn't make valid PDFs.

    One other thing: copying and pasting does not work, and I have a hard time believing you can “tweak just about everything”. I changed every setting possible in import settings and nothing helped: because it is a bad PDF, not because of ID.

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