Keep formatting etc. when Placing Excel sheets in InDesign

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    • #54728
      Ann Farr
      Member

      The book publisher I work for sends me an Excel spreadsheet twice a year of an ENORMOUS (sorry!) book catalogue. There are 15 columns and each row makes up one paragraph of info about a particular book. There are about 1500 books. My problem is the formatting. The publisher enters all the text in the Excel sheet but, however I import it (Place, Copy and Paste), the formatting doesn't come through and everything arrives in Times Regular (the default font in my InD CS4 — Intel iMac). This makes for a very very intensive workload, to say the least. How can I hang onto the formatting? Particularly the italicised text in the Excel spreadsheet. What I know about Excel could be written on the back of a postage stamp! I always turn on the Placing options — if I imported the data as any sort of table, I'd have a lovely time (with the emphasis on 'time') converting each row to a paragraph (i.e., deleting endless tabs …). Anyway, many thanks for your help.

    • #54767

      I'm so sorry, I can't think of a single trick.

      When you place the spreadsheet, isn't it coming in as a table? (“If I imported the data as any sort of table….”)

      If you copy/paste, what are you copy/pasting? One cell at a time, one row, one column?

      AM

    • #54769
      Eugene Tyson
      Member

      How about saving the Excel File as Tab Delimited, but that's just a text file?

      You can then massage the text and remove tabs or else convert it back to a table?

    • #54778
      Bob Levine
      Participant

      I'm not sure I get what you're trying to do. You say you want to keep the formatting but then you mention converting the table to text.

      In my experience, if the table if properly formatted in Excel and you place it choosing formatted table, you shouldn't have any major issues.

      If you do want text, consider creating a nested paragraph style using tabs to begin and end the styling. Pasting the table as text will convert the cell borders to tabs.

      Bob

    • #54789
      Ann Farr
      Member

      Hi — thanks for all the suggestions. The one that's really hitting the spot at the moment is Bob Levine's and using the tabs to create the nested paragraph. You've no idea how hard I've tried to create this nested paragraph — but never thought of tab delimited — what a ninny! Thanks so much Bob.

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