Designing an Excel doc

ShakeyDesign  wrote
I'm not 100% comfortable in Excel, so any Adobe product or execution suggestion(s) to help me achieve an easier design experience would be much appreciated!

Now that you have several Photoshop answers, I will offer an Adobe alternative:

You can place an Excel file directly into InDesign, with or without formatting. You can place it linked to the Excel sheet or not linked. If it is linked, it is required that you use styles without overrides. (Paragraph styles are embedded in Cell styles; Cell styles are embedded in a Table style.) You can put pictures into a table cell and it becomes a graphic cell. It is awesome! These details are brief, but that's the gist of it. For details, ask in the InDesign forum.

InDesign does not do math, but if you place it as a linked file and use styles, you can update the link when the Excel sheet changes. This works like a charm when you get the steps down. All the formatting is in InDesign.

We'd really like to help if we can, but it comes down to guessing without being able to see what you are trying to match to what.  Excel has a snap feature for graphics, so I'd start with a Photoshop graphic if adequate resolution, but you would need to get the aspect ratio right.  I'd maybe make a series of reference guides on the graphic, save and load it into the Excel sheet, and modify the graphic in Photoshop using those reference guides to place things.

Then save out the JPG or PNG to a different file name, and use the right click > change picture, to swap to the updated graphic.

This to consider are that with Excel's snap to feature, you could break up the graphic into multiple parts, and they would join seamlessly in Excel because of the snap.  Another approach would be to make use of transparent backgrounds with PNG files, which Excel recognises.  So if you lay down your graphics and turn off the background layer, and save out to PNG

Then place the PNG in Excel and it honours the transparency.  That's going to open up your options.

With the graphic inserted, select it and go Format > Align > Snap to grid and it can be locked to grid lines.  You can mess with the aspect ratio when doing this if it looks OK.

Note, that changing cell width and/or height will break the graphic alignment, but I bet your can lock the graphic to the grid if you look into it.  Hmmm...  I just had a wee look and it might or might not work for you, as it looks like you lock images to a whole cell, or merged cells.  That is fine if you do not want a live window inside the graphic boundary, but you could get round that by breaking up the gaphic into multiple parts.  A bit awkward, but you'd only need to do it the once.

http://www.solveyourtech.com/lock-image-cell-excel-2010/

I imagine that if you asked about this in an Excel forum, the experts there will say easy peasy, you just do this..... 

Good luck, and do please show us what you make if it is not commercially sensitive.

There doesn't seem to be anyway to import the doc into Photoshop while retaining all of the math functions and such that are built into it.

That's like expecting PS to do your laundry as well. Excel in itself is just as complex as PS, only in a different way. Different tools for different tasks. At best you can hope that any program that is able to import Excel files will be able to retain the appearance or the functionality, but I know of no way to get both and clearly even if such a thing existed your client wouldn't appreciate having to buy some obscure piece of software he has to learn or sign up to some annoying web service. You just have to learn to work within the limitations of Excel and adapt your workflow. It's not at all impossible to create pretty fancy spreadsheets and charts, it just takes quite a bit of work.

Mylenium

There's no magic to do this, just as you can't turn Excel into a great photo editor. Make the graphics in Photoshop and place In Excel. Or retype everything in Photoshop If you have infinite time and patience. Look into saving a finished product from Excel as PDF. Photoshop can help you turn the PDF to web graphics if you must.

ShakeyDesign  wrote There doesn't seem to be anyway to import the doc into Photoshop while retaining all of the math functions and such that are built into it.

That seems to read as if you would like the Excel sheet to function as an Excel sheet inside Photoshop.  That's not possible.  Separate out the graphic content of the Excel sheet, and work on that separately. That's as simple as right clicking the image inside the Excel document, and choosing Change Picture. 

I'm kind of thinking that you must have known all that, but that is the way I am reading your question.

Hi

Well, In my book, you will need to accelerate your Excel proficiency, that's not so hard (ton's of online tutorials).

Or try Apple Numbers

Pierre