Excel 365 to InDesign ‘Database Connector’ to expose a OneDrive XLSX sheet as a CSV for Data Merge?

Question

I have a link to an Excel 365 workbook ‘database’ on OneDrive. The contents are being updated by numerous people, with field lengths varying wildly – if those people have a design brief, I don't have access to it. It would be so nice if a database-connector-like-thing could present the relevant sheet as an InDesign-compliant CSV Data Source to InDesign Data Merge. That way I could quickly* Update Data Source and Preview how my document design copes with any new and exciting innovations in the six fields I need to ingest, which are currently varying between empty, to formatted poems, to long essays.

Has anybody heard of such a Creative Cloud App or MS 365 Add-In?

*instead of saving a copy locally, converting line-breaks to something unique, and exporting a CSV.

Dave Creamer of IDEAS · Answer

InDesign's native feature can place and link to Excel files as a table. Otherwise, you want a third-party plugin. Many of the companies offer a more-advanced plugin that can link to a database (rather than import a tab- or comma-delimited file). Some may link to the Excel file directly, but most require Excel to publish as an ODBC connection.

Ones I've used include Em Software, 65bit, and Teacup software--but there are others.

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