Does Excel like us?

[bowen192]

Hello

Background

I am currently writing manuals for a company who produce lifting tools

They have a client that currently requires them to fill in an excel spreadsheet with a breakdown of the lifting tool and it's components.

I currently create part numbers (I'm in the process of starting to create a numbering system) and put all this information in to the lifeting tool manual/FM.

Question

Is there a way of copying/creating information from Excel in to FM so I don't have to type in everything manually?

Thanks

[Bob_Niland]

What we do, in a nutshell ...

Open the XLS in LibreOffice (formerly OpenOffice) Calc.

Select the cells of interest.

File > Export as PDF

(*) Selection

Import the PDF into Frame.

You can probably do something similar in Excel, perhaps send a print region to PDF, but Mr.Bill has improved Excel beyond repair.

Resist the temptation to import as OLE.

[Van Kurtz]

Bowen,

1. Error's suggestion creates a PDF, which of course will have the formatting that you create for the spreadsheet within Excel. If you have a special formatting for your tables in FrameMaker, then this may not be what you want.

2. A long time ago Arnis Gubins indicated that one could import an Excel spreadsheet BY COPY into a Frame document and FrameMaker converts it into a table. Note that the point is to import by copy, NOT reference.

I just tried copying a spreadsheet by copy into an unstructured Frame file, and it works. I copied all the sheets of the spreadsheet. I suggest keeping the spreadsheet simple. It did not copy in an image embedded in the spreadsheet.

I also tried copying by reference, and the result was the same as by copy except that it was a text inset, instead of editable content.

Van

[bowen192]

Thanks for the replies.

The copy function works very well.  Now I need to format it.

Now I know you can edit and save ruling styles, but can you save a Table style so I could just apply this to the imported text?  Then I have all the information I need, in the format I want, in just a few clicks.

Could be good this!

[Van Kurtz]

Now I know you can edit and save ruling styles, but can you save a Table style so I could just apply this to the imported text?  Then I have all the information I need, in the format I want, in just a few clicks.

Yes. You can save a table style created in the Table Designer. Then when you import a spreadsheet by copy, select the whole table and apply the style from the Table Designer. Depending upon the complexity of your formatting, you may not be able to record everything in a table style, such as formatting applied in customer rules and shading.

Van

[Bob_Niland]

1. Error's suggestion creates a PDF, ...

And it's worth mentioning that PDF import is only stable in FM8 or later. We use FM7.1 and actually import EPS copies of the exported PDFs.

... which of course will have the  formatting that you create for the spreadsheet within Excel. If you have  a special formatting for your tables in FrameMaker, then this may not  be what you want.

We mimic the Frame formatting in the spreadsheet. In the final PDF out of Frame, the only way you can tell that a table is an imported object is by the small gray tracking number we add in an empty cell.

Some further tips:

• Do your formatting on a copy of the cells of interest, perhaps on a separate sheet.
• If you issue object numbers for imports, use that number as the sheet name.
• Include other track-back and stewardship information above or below the cells of interest (cropped by the anchoring frame in Framemaker, but accessible to future document maintainers). This data might include:
  - path to and source spreadsheet name
  - spreadheet owner ID
  - revision date
  - sheet name
  - formatter's ID, formatting date
  - export target
• Black fill corner cells defining the export region (crop marks)
• We also include brief formatting and exporting instructions below all of the above

_______

I've had to deal with way too many erroneous and unreliable native Frame tables and screen-shot chart imports that had zero track-back and provenance information.