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• • December 29, 2016 at 7:12 am #90818
    Andrew Ballantine

    Member

    I’m hoping for a little light to be shed on this subject before I tear my hair out… I have a large Excel spreadsheet (10 columns, 3 000 rows) that must be imported as a formatted table as there are multiple categories that are defined throughout the Excel doc by bold, italic, and underline, and combinations thereof. These have to come in so that I can add paragraph and character styles in InDesign using find/change.

    The spreadsheet also has some cells that have different text formatting within the same cell (eg one word being italic, the next word being underlined), and the problem is InDesign seems to recognise only the formatting of the first word, and will not honour the different formatting of subsequent words within each cell.

    I’ve tried saving in earlier spreadsheet formats, as well as other workarounds, but nothing seems to be working. If I can’t get this right I’m doomed to manually format this whole thing!

  • December 29, 2016 at 8:17 am #90819
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I just created a very simple 1-row table in Excel (Mac 2011), saved as xlsx and imported it. In one of the cells, I had some text underline and some with strikeout. It imported into InDesign with the formatting intact.
    Try making a duplicate of your file, then deleting all but one or two rows to see if it works. My guess is that something is interfering with the formatting. For example, perhaps a character style is being applied to the text?

  • January 1, 2017 at 1:21 am #90842
    Andrew Ballantine

    Member

    Thanks David, it was indeed Excel formatting that the client applied to his cells. I selected all the cells in Excel, hit the ‘Normal’ cell format button (all text-level formatting remained intact), then reimported the table and it honoured all the formatting. Thanks so much for your insight! Have a great 2017…

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