How do I see a list of OLE links in my book?

[suemac80]

I have a FrameMaker 9.0 book that has several OLE links to Excel spreadsheets. How do I create a list of references to those spreadsheets, similar to the one I could create for a list of imported graphics?

I am aware of the Links dialog box, but due to the length of the path name and the restriction on resizing that dialog box (grrrr!), the information is unusable. 

Thanks in advance for your help!

Sue

[Arnis_Gubins]

You can't within FM. The Links dialog is the only mechanism within FM that lets you know about OLE links (that's one of the reasons OLE is not a best practices method for getting content into FM). Alternatively, FM will let you import Excel files by reference, so depending upon the content needed, this might be something else to consider.

A last resort would be to create MIF verisons of your FM files and then use a grep-like search tool to find the OLE entries.

[suemac80]

Thanks Arnis.  Unfortunately, importing by reference will not work for our purposes.

I did try saving as MIF and using MIFBrowse but that seemed like more trouble than it was worth!  Maybe I'll revisit now that I know that that is sort of my only option.

Do you know if the Links dialog box can be resized in either FrameMaker 10 or 11?  That would actually work for us, but the paths are so long the text becomes garbled, as you can see.

Thanks,

Sue

[Arnis_Gubins]

Sue,

Unfortunately, the dialogue can't be re-sized and the behaviour is the same in version up to FM11.

One thing that you might be able to try is to (at the system level) create a mapped drive to the deepest common level and use the drive in FM when linking, e.g. let K: map to "C:\... whatever ...\Model Reports\Asia\Korea data\Version 9.0\ "

You might need to do a one-shot re-link or a search & replace in the MIF to do this to get the mapped drive to show.