Tables and Excel Importing

​@Dave Creamer of IDEAS  and ​@leo.r  have already given you solid, experience-based advice here, especially around linking Excel data and the reality of the learning curve it’s worth taking seriously.

Just to add something that hasn’t been said yet, and might help you practically move forward:

The part that will make or break this workflow isn’t really InDesign, it’s how well your Excel is structured before it ever gets imported. If your tables feel “annoying” to edit now, that usually means the data isn’t normalised enough yet for automation.

What tends to work well in cases like your spec sheets is:

Keep Excel very “flat” and consistent, avoid visual formatting, merged cells, or layout thinking there.
Structure each table so it can be interpreted logically (clear headers, no empty rows, consistent column meaning across all sheets).

If you need what looks like “tables within tables” in InDesign, that’s often better handled through styling and scripting on the InDesign side not literally nested structures coming from Excel.

One useful approach (especially since you’re already using AI to extract data) is to split your data into:

core product data (for Data Merge)
table data (handled separately via linked Excel tables or scripts)

Trying to force everything through Data Merge alone can get messy fast, particularly with complex tables.

Also worth considering: if you’re going to be doing a lot of these, a small JSX script to post-process imported tables (apply specific cell styles, fix header rows, etc.) can save you a huge amount of repetitive cleanup time. That’s often the missing “middle layer” between Excel and final layout.

So in short Dave is right about styles and linking, Leo is right about complexity but the extra lever you have here is tightening your data structure and possibly adding light scripting, rather than relying purely on manual styling or plugins.

If you can tell us more about your workflow, or supply sample files I’m sure we can help you get something simple and reliable going. 

I don’t have anything to add to the options for your potential workflow that ​@Dave Creamer of IDEAS has already listed.

Only one thing: you mentioned that it’s your first time using InDesign. Unless you have basically unlimited time on your hands to dedicate to this project, you may want to outsource it to a third party that already has extensive experience in building this kind of InDesign workflows. Your project requires highly advanced knowledge of InDesign and, most likely, an experience in operating complex InDesign plug-ins. 

In theory, it’s sure possible to learn all this on the go and advance one step at a time via numerous trial-and-error attempts. But, in my opinion, it won’t be easy and it won’t be fast.

You can link to the Excel file if the data is constantly changing. For that, you need to use Table Styles and Cell Styles. (Paragraph Styles are applied through the Cell Styles.)

You will still have to make some manual edits to the tables, such as applying Cell styles to the secondary header rows. (Merging can be done in Excel.)

Other options include using a database plugin such as Em Software InData Pro, 65bit EasyCatalog, etc. You will have to do some research on those. I use InData and have used EasyCatalog in the past. There are others such as Teacup Software Datalinker but I’m not sure if it handles tables.