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Hello community. I'm trying to make an automatic invoice for my design company. I want the invoice to do the design through InDesign and the calculations with an Excel spreadsheet. This way i'll only have to update the excel file and a new invoice is created. I am very close. But ran into a minor problem. In Excel I created a logic statement which will only fills the cell with data if another cell contains data. The logic statement looks like this:
=IF(IFBLANK(B8);"";"hours of")
This makes the cell empty when B8 isn't filled. And makes it show "hours of" when B8 is filled.
This works perfectly in Excel. However, when I place the linked excel sheet in my InDesign file as an unformatted table, these empty or "hours of" cells always show "-1", in either state. In another cell, where the variable is a currency when filled, it shows as "€ (1,00)" when empty. It does show the right currency when filled. It looks to me as if the problem only occurs when i'm using as a text as a value in a formula. Because 'Non-filled' cells are basically empty text cells described as: "".
The problem stops when I import the design with the table (formatted) (I have no idea why). This doesn't work for me because InDesign has its own styles for the table. I want to be able to fill something in Excel and it shows the right data needed for the invoice. Then InDesign is solely responsible for the design and should work automatically when the file is updated.
My question is: How do I make my unformatted Excel table import not show this weird data? (Without cheating and changing fonts to white for instance).
Thanks in advance!
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I'm having a similar issue with IF statements and am still looking for an answer. Did you ever find a solution?