How to paste tabbed data directly into FM7 table cells?

[garybeckwith]

<<<<on edit.... changed FM8 to FM7... I have FM7, not FM8>>>

Hello

I'm working on a documentation job that requires a pasting external data into existing table cells in FM7.

I have tried several things but I can't find a way to paste the data directly into the table cells.  The source data can be delimited text, or spreadsheet cells. Neither can be pasted into an existing table.   The only way I can make this work is to first paste it into FM as text, then convert it to another table, and then copy/paste from that table into the existing one.  This is a lot of extra work and it seems there should be a way to paste external data directly across table cells.   I also tried "paste special" but that is not an option when I have table cells selected.

Any ideas???

It would be much appreciated!

Thanks

Gary Beckwith

[Arnis Gubins]

Gary,

"Delimited text" is just text to FM, so no magic there.

A range of cells from a spread sheet when pasted into a FM text flow using Paste Special > Rich Text Format will paste these as a table. You can then copy this table (range of cells and rows) into your desired table.

A few less steps but not ideal. Unfortuantely, that's the best that FM (even v.9) can do. You can import Excel spreadsheets though, so it might be easier to assemble the content outside of FM and then import the final product.

[garybeckwith]

thanks AG.  this does save me one step, as I was pasting as text and then converting to table.  however I still have to make a separate table and then copy/paste to my desired existing table.

the trouble here is that the target tables already exist.  They have been formatted, with headings all labeled, etc, so I would lose a ton of work to make new tables.   it's unfortunate that you can't paste delimited text into an existing table in FM....  It seems to be a common feature of many other programs.  But thanks for your help!   Maybe someone else will still post an unknown way of accomplishing this, so I'll leave the thread open for now.

thanks again

gary

[AxialInfo]

I'm vaguely remembering that there might be some 3rd party utility for assisting with table-bopping, you might try perusing the tool search engines such as

http://www.leximation.com

http://www.microtype.com/links.html

or maybe even a Framescript might be able to handle various copy/paste functionality, you might ask on the FS list,

    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/framescript-users/

[AxialInfo]

Gary, just had a thought -- I've worked on several projects where I used variables in tables that might work better for you.

Basically the idea is to pre-populate the tables in your chapter with variables in the cells, and then import a minimalist MIF file that only contains the variable definitions for the pre-existing variables.  The minimalist MIF file can be made quite easily from a database or from an Excel CSV or TSV export by using various scripting utilities to convert comma-delimited text into the MIF syntax.

I've created chapters that had hundreds of thousands of cells with variables in them, and updating the variables is incredibly quick.

The best way to approach the variable naming is to come up with a convention that is easy to apply, I found .r1c1 etc to be a good starting point (the period so that the variables all sort in the same place in FM, the lower-case letters to make the variable's name as horizontally short as possible.