I produce a number of reports for our customers regularly, the reports being tailored/specific to each of the customers. The reports are in Indesign, and include two tables of data imported from Excel, one of which is 200 rows. That data includes a column with ratings that are based on one of 7 possible values.
What I’m trying to do is to figure out how to easily make the “rating” column values infographics rather than just terms or numeric values. The issue is that no matter what I do I can’t figure out an alternative to manually curating the rating for each table row, which with 200 rows per report and 30+ reports is impractical.
I should note that the rating column in Excel uses conditional formatting, mostly because it’s the easiest way to generate a rule based visual. I don’t necessarily want to stick with Excel’s visualizataions, but I will if it’s the easiest approach. In terms of the data import to Indesign, for simplicity I currently just Paste In Place to a same sized data grid. However, I’ve also tried Placing the XLS or XLSX into the Indesign file. Neither solution will maintain any visualization from Excel.
I’m open to ANY solution to this, whether that’s part of import or within Indesign itself. The big issue is simply that Indesign doesn’t seem to have any logic/programmatic capabilities for me to use to generate the infographics/visuals. Hand curating the reports is simply impractical with 4k/5k rows to deal with.
Any help or tips are appreciated.
Thanks,
Rick
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