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• • November 20, 2009 at 7:54 am #53850
    Roland

    Member

    Almost two years ago I finished a catalog containing loads of tables and anchored images. It worked great, as the data came from Excel, so pasting everything in was a relative breeze. Now the client want to (finally) update the catalog, and asked if I could send him an Excel file with the catalog's contents.

    InDesigns script for exporting stories doesn't help, and I don't want to copy & paste each individual table's contents. Is there an easy way to do this? Right now I'm even thinking about simply creating a PDF and trying to copy & paste per page from there…

  • November 20, 2009 at 3:27 pm #53856
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Didn't you keep the original Excel file? It would — most likely — mean you have to re-do the formatting, but I don't think that'd survive the round-trip anyway.

    Tables are correctly exported in RTF, so you can look at them in Word … well, I got stuck there as I'm not really into Word. Perhaps copy+paste would work from that into Excel.

    Here's a suggestion. Convert the tables in InDesign to plain text, with a comma inbetween the values (the Convert-to-text allows you to change it from its default Tab). Then export to plain text, and import as CVS (Comma Separated Values) into Excel.

    This does work even if the text contains comma's, tabs and hard returns — you have to replace them with something “safe” first, such as [ThisWasAComma] [etc.] before converting to text.

    It will definitely not work for anything else than a pure plain table — in casu, merged cells and columns will be lost or mangled beyond recognition.

  • November 20, 2009 at 3:40 pm #53858
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Just wondering if perhaps Data Merge would be a better route for importing the data?

    You can certainly copy and paste to Excel, but Excel, as far as I know, doesn't support styles.

    You'll lose a lot of Data + man hours this way.

    Perhaps you can attempt InCopy instead. This would be easier for you both, a bit of a learning curve, but so would the excel route.

  • November 23, 2009 at 7:34 am #53910
    Roland

    Member

    Jongware, your suggestion might be what I missed: convert back to comma-delimited text and copy-paste that into a TXT file to open in Excel.

    I did save the Excel files, but there were so many neither him nor I can make heads or tails of them anymore, also because many changes were made after placing the content into the ID file.

  • December 4, 2009 at 11:15 am #54135
    Roland

    Member

    Problem: there are 77 pages with 5 to 7 tables of various length per page, totaling over 350 tables to convert. Does anyone know of a script that'll auto-convert the tables for me?

  • December 4, 2009 at 12:04 pm #54138
    Colin Flashman

    Member

    have you tried this application from rorohiko?

    https://www.rorohiko.com/wordpr…..-exporter/

    have a client at the moment who needed to take his indesign art and ship it as a word file to several authors who don't have (and won't get) indesign. the exportallstories.jsx crashed cs4 several times but this app did the trick… to word at least. don't know how you'd go to excel but thought you might appreciate the heads-up.

  • December 4, 2009 at 3:36 pm #54141
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Roland, this “script” (it's a single line!) will convert all tables to text, separating the columns by a comma, and the rows by a hard return. It's a javascript, so save it with a “.jsx” extension.

    app.activeDocument.stories.everyItem().tables.everyItem().convertToText (",", "r");

  • December 7, 2009 at 9:11 am #54161
    Roland

    Member

    Jongware: that's so cool. One line of JavaScript and you saved the day :) It worked perfectly.

  • June 17, 2019 at 9:14 am #117212
    Melanie Drouhard

    Member

    Hi! Thank you for sharing this…

    I tried this script, but it did not include the hard returns… my data is just rows and rows of numbers, that breaks at the end of the text box parameters, instead of showing columns, so it’s difficult to differentiate when the next row begins. Is there something I can apply to the table styling to prevent this?

    My other question is that I have 100+ different documents, that each have tables, that need to be converted and combined into a single document in Excel. Is there a way to batch automate this? Otherwise, my plan is to just open each individual document and copy+paste each table from each file. The data only exists in these Indesign sheets currently and is needed to be gathered populate a new, complex web site being built.

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