Merged cells and line break

[LeneLykkeM]

Hi,

I have linked an excel sheet to my InDesign, and it updates perfectly with my character, paragraph, cell and table styles. But I have two issues I can't fix:

• one of my headings is in a horizontally merged cell in excel, but it comes in unmerged. I have then merged in InDesign, but every time I update it gets unmerged again.
• I have a cell in excel with a forced line break. When imported part of the second line can be on the first line, so InDesign breaks it differently. If I make a forced line break in InDesign it disappears when the link to excel is updated.

Hope someone can help.

Lene

[Eugene Tyson]

Hello

When linking your excel file - File>Place and click Show Options

Is the table format set to Formatted or Unformatted? 

[LeneLykkeM]

Hi, sorry for the late reply. It seems I did not get any alerts on the question. It is Unformatted and then I do the formatting in InDesign - but the problem is not there anymore. Now I have a new one posted in another question today. A bit of the same, but this time with upper/lower case in Unformatted tables.

[Creamer Training · Accepted solution]

Some tips...

• Make sure you use ONLY Cell and Table styles when linking an Excel file. Do not apply paragraph styles directly--the formatting will be removed when updating. (Link Paragraph styles to Cell styles--then apply Cell styles.)
• Do not make ANY edits to content--including typos and merging. They will be wiped out when updating.
• In Excel, make absolutely sure the cells are merged. They can LOOK merged if the adjacent cells do not have any content.

Excel view:

In InDesign:

• As you noted, Excel's forced line breaks are supported ignored. What I would do is put a unique code in the Excel file, then do a F/C in InDesign. Save the query in ID--then run it as needed. Another option is to work around it--for example, use a colon instead.  [edited]

Excel view with a forced line break (after the "a") and with the code:

[LeneLykkeM]

Thank you 🙂 

[Creamer Training]

I corrected my post. Excel forced line breaks (Alt-Enter) are supported. 

Note: I did not test on Excel for Mac.