How do you handle Excel tables in InDesign?

1

I’m curious how other designers handle Excel tables in production workflows, especially when the final document is built in InDesign.

In my work, bringing an Excel table into InDesign has often involved much more than transferring the content. Column widths, row heights, merged cells, fonts, font sizes, colors, borders, alignment, and other formatting may all need to be recreated or adjusted.

That led me to develop a Windows tool called ETIC (Excel Table to InDesign Converter).

ETIC analyzes formatted Excel tables and generates editable IDML tables while carrying over much of the original Excel formatting.

I’m curious how others currently handle this kind of work. Do you copy and paste, place/link Excel files, use scripts or plugins, or rebuild the tables manually?

I’ve made a 10-day free trial available if anyone would like to try it with their own Excel files:

I’d be especially interested in feedback from designers who regularly work with Excel-based tables in InDesign.

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Copy and paste it in. The build/apply table and cell styles.

Once the table style is built apply it to others.

I’ve created a few scripts, one makes the table fit to the text frame so it doesn’t go outside the text frame.

And it also sets the padding and stroke colour and stroke size.

So if i have 20 tables i can run the fit tables script and it does all 20.

I can adjust the script easily but it’s basically the start.

Then just apply the table style and cell styles.

3

The font map is interesting but why not do that in indesign with find replace font?

I prefer using styles. No need to map any font then.

4

Thanks — that makes sense.

With that kind of workflow, I can see why ETIC probably wouldn’t add much. If you’ve already built table and cell styles and have scripts handling things like fitting tables, padding and strokes, you can process a large number of tables very efficiently.

ETIC is aimed at a somewhat different workflow. The idea is to take a table that has already been structured and formatted in Excel and convert that formatting and structure into an editable InDesign table, rather than rebuilding the formatting in InDesign with table and cell styles.

And yes, Find/Replace Font in InDesign is certainly another way to handle fonts. ETIC’s font mapping is there so the Excel fonts can be mapped to the desired InDesign fonts before the IDML is generated.

Your example is actually very useful feedback, because it shows me that for a style- and script-driven workflow like yours, ETIC may offer much less benefit. That’s exactly the kind of real-world workflow comparison I was hoping to learn from.

5

Your answer is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNyFy-86ZQ0

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I wouldn’t recommend any other workflow outside of using styles, Table Styles, Cell Styles, Paragraph and Character styles.

Even without a script most of the table structure and formatting is retained. Maybe with a few tweaks.

If your EITC was able to apply Table Styles or construct styles, then it’s useful.

Without it it’s just a different way to import.

Styles should always be used, then making global changes is easy.

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7

Just a few other observations after watching the video again.

InDesign already allows mapping of fonts - where this is ok in your setup - I’d consider allowing
Headers
Left Column/Right Column
Footers
etc. to be mapped to the actual indesign document fonts ore prefereably styles

And also with the colours, people are not going to type in the colours by CMYK - that’s a bit tedious.
Instead you could offer a colour mapping option

Headers - blue to InDesign CMYK or Pantone swatch
etc.

this would be a bit more robust.

But I think it’s a good start - and you should seriously consider having it build the InDesign Table and Cell Styles and the Paragraph and Character styles.

That would be really powerful then.

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