Back

If your email is not recognized and you believe it should be, please contact us.

  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.Login

Can I do a reverse mail Merge from ID CS5 back to Excel?

Return to Member Forum

  • Author
    Posts
    • #62283
      Dubai Dave
      Participant

      Ok here's the issue. We got an excel file from a client that has lots of info for a big beer and spirits guide. We dropped it in, and once we checked through it there were mistakes everywhere.

      So we cleaned it up, designed it and went to press and it looks great.

      Only issue us the client now wants the cleaned up Excel file, but we never changed the file and to copy and paste everything back in would take forever.

      Is there a way to do a 'reverse mail merge' and extract the data back into the right columns in Excel from Indesign CS 5?

      Thaks for any help,

      Dave

    • #62284

      a big beer and spirits guide …

      A dream job! (Do you know how hot it is here in Holland, right now?)

      There are not that many export possibilities out of InDesign for text — plain text, RTF, or, if you tagged your ID file, XML. So it mainly depends on how much you “changed” Excel's column data on merging. For example, if you merged all column data into single lines, you'd need a lot of manual work restoring the proper columns again.

      If the text formatting is not important, I think you can best try exporting all to plain text. Add tabs between the original columns, then try if Excel can import tab delimited data. If it does not, replace the tabs with comma's and save as CSV — “Comma Separated Values”. I'm sure Excel can read that.

      Some smart preparation in the ID document can help you as well. Is your data now put in a table? “Convert to text” is your friend, inserting tabs and new lines automatically. Unique paragraph or character styles for every (or even “some”) data item? Use that to your advantage to mark as much as you can with search-and-replace.

    • #62285
      Dubai Dave
      Participant

      I bet it's not as hot as it is here in Dubai mate!

      We have imported them via mail merge into various different text boxes. We can copy and paste from a PDF or I can export as a Word doc through a little script I found.

      I will look into the CSV file format though..thnks for the info.

Viewing 2 reply threads
  • The forum ‘General InDesign Topics (CLOSED)’ is closed to new topics and replies.
Forum Ads