If my company has an Excel spreadsheet of all of our part numbers (we are a manufacturing company) is there a way to automate a parts list and have the output end up in a FrameMaker table?
Give one of the scripting gurus a shout - like @frameexpert or Russ Ward, etc. Do a quick forum search for "scripting" to get more guru-hits (because my brain is fried right now & I can't recall them all)
I did a lot of these over the years because FrameScript, a third-party scripting plugin for FrameMaker, can read and write Excel spreadsheets directly. Now with ExtendScript built into FrameMaker, I typically use XML to FrameMaker so the Excel content has to be exported to XML first. ExtendScript can't read/write to Excel directly.
Many moons ago I helped a transit company automate their bus schedules using their existing InDesign and Excel workflow. IIRC, I had them import the files by reference using (gasp!) OLE, which allowed updates to the schedules to overwrite originals and show up automatically.
OLE is not my favorite solution, but it worked like a charm for such simple files. You can also do the same with EPS files imported by reference.
InDesign has a lot more third-party tools available for integrating outside data into documents. You can actually do Excel to InDesign with stock InDesign. I just did a catalog project using XML to InDesign via Xtags from Em Software. It worked very well. I have also used EasyCatalog, which is more of a high-end tool but very powerful and flexible. A lot depends on your specific requirements. If you want to discuss your particular workflow, please contact me offlist. Thank you. rick at frameexpert dot com
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