Importing a list of prices from Excel file

[IanDesign]

Hi everyone,

I've been asked to supply a PDF of a sales sheet with a blank column that the client will populate with various prices. Imagine a 3-column table with about 100 rows/products. Column 1 and 2 are name of product and maybe product code. Column 3 will eventually be price, but they'd like to populate this themselves and change the prices per region. They'd be importing the price data from an Excel file.

I'm familiar with mail merge, but this seems different as I'm not trying to create 100 separate docs. I need to fill in 100 separate fields in a single doc. 

[ls_rbls]

Hi,

you can print to PDF and create your own fillable fields. This is the long method.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Th6Kfy_0WHw 

You may as well use a paid-for app or third party plugins with auto mail merge for Adobe Acrobat 

[try67 · Accepted solution]

This is not a simple task, but not impossible either. It will require the development of a custom-made tool since what you're asking for is not exactly mail-merge, nor is it a straight forward data import into form fields, either. However, if you add fields with consistent names (Price1, Price2, etc.) and those names match the row numbers of the data in your Excel file then it should be possible to do it.

[Thom Parker]

Read this:

https://www.pdfscripting.com/public/Form-Data-Handling.cfm

[IanDesign]

Hey guys, so sorry for the delay here. Thought we were abondoning this idea but it looks like they still wanna do it. I appreciate all the responses. try67, you mentioned that matching fields with row numbers? Can you explain further? I'm familiar with having column names match fields but not rows.

[try67]

Each row in the Excel file contains one set of data, right? So Row 1 in the Excel sheet is Product 1 (cell A1, let's say) and Price 1 (cell B1), then Row 2 is Product 2 (A2) and Price 2 (B2), etc.

If you then have fields in the PDF called Product1, Price1, etc. then you could match those fields names to the number of the row (or line number, since you will need to save the Excel file as a text file first) and populate them with the data from that row.

[IanDesign]

The matching makes sense, but can that be automated or batched so that all 100 or so products/prices come in at once. I have a feeling it can only be done 1 row at a time?

[try67]

Yes, it can be, using a script. If you're interested in hiring a professional to write this script for you feel free to contact me privately via [try6767 at gmail.com].

[IanDesign]

That sounds interesting. I'd have to talk to the boss about outsourcing, but it might be our only option. Would the script be easy enough and able to be used again and again by the clients sales team. They'd be updating these every month or so.