Reply To: Slow updates with linked Excel document

Sometimes, you’d have to copy-paste just to get the control you want, and that’s just so very tedious on big jobs. This could be a real problem when Excel and InDesign are not in the best of terms with each other, leaving you doing stuff manually that you thought would have been automated. Been there; that is an enormous amount of time wasted.

Anyway, WordsFlow Pro can save your life, especially when you’re working with Excel files. Admittedly, the “one and a half-way workflow” that it offers is not perfect, but the fact that it allows you to update your content in Excel while maintaining your InDesign formatting is huge. You can still format the cells and columns in InDesign without having to really be concerned that all of your hard work could get lost in updates. This is not a full two-way sync yet, but even this one-way update feature saves so much time compared to manual adjustments. Definitely worth checking out for future projects, especially if you manage large catalogs such as this one.