Importing Excel into Indesign very slow

[dicom75886549]

Hi,

I'm working for a company where we required a way to import and dynamically change price numbers within Excel and update the same inside Indesign. Indesign has a neat feature to do just that. The problem is just that it's slow no matter the machine power. I've tested it on a range of laptops from low-end to high-end. The results are just bad. I don't understand why it requires so much processing power to import simple ranges and apply InDesign styles to it.

If someone has a solution to speed it up please let me know.

[BobLevine]

You haven’t given us a thing to go on.

What version of InDesign? What version of Excel? XLS or XLXS? What operating system? How large are these files?

Finally, what does “very slow” mean? 12 seconds? 12 minutes?

[dicom75886549]

- Indesign 2017 CC

- Excel 2013 (7 MB, around 25 sheets, around 500 links) .xlsm

- Windows 10 and Windows 7.

- Updating time: around 30 minutes or more depending on the machine.

[Eternal Warrior]

What Bob wanted was the internal specs of the machine... how much RAM, what processor, etc etc...

[BobLevine]

I wonder if that has anything to do with the macros. That’s a large file but I wouldn’t expect it to take this long.

How are you creating the links?

[dicom75886549]

- Asus ROG i7-4720HQ / 16 GB RAM

I'm placing as unformatted with table styles attached to that specific range.

[BobLevine]

So, it’s one table or multiple cells linked?

If it’s one table try resaving as XLS or XLSX and place the file again.

[dicom75886549]

Tested it converting to .xslx. Still same speed.

[BobLevine]

One more thought. Try placing the file in another document to see if that makes a difference.

[Eternal Warrior]

Macros or possibly they have a lot of formulas that are being repeated in the excel document that are unnecessary???

Alternatively, if its a specific range of the data rather than the whole sheet they could use a new excel document to link to only those cell references and use that to update the InDesign document... although admittedly this adds an additional... but minor step in their workflow.

[dicom75886549]

So basically formulas or any type of formula slows it down, no matter if it's a macro formula or an integrated function?

[Eternal Warrior]

It's not a clear cut answer as it depends on the amount and complexity of formulas (and if they are stored as array formulas) and how combined everything is... i.e. does the data on sheet 1 use data from sheet 3 plus sheet 2... etc...

But yes there is documented evidence and many sites that will say that formulas "CAN" slow down your computer... especially when a small change here affects a whole sheets worth of data...

Emphasis on the word CAN...

Given that your excel file is 7 MB then that's either quite a hefty amount of data in there or you have lots of formulas that are adding to the file size and COULD be slowing your [EDIT] Update down.

[Eternal Warrior]

If its only like 10-100 cells that you need to reference/update in InDesign you could... as stated earlier... make another smaller excel file and use the = formula to link back to the relevant cell reference in the main 7 MB excel document. Then just use the smaller file when updating InDesign...

It's probably a little crude (and will add an additional step or two to your workflow) but it should work.

[dicom75886549]

I'll test that out and report the results.

[BobLevine]

If it’s faster in another file, the take the file you have and export it to IDML. It’s possible you have a little bit of corruption somewhere causing this.

[Eternal Warrior]

The link formula is easy to use either copy the cells as normal and then right click and paste link in the new document or you can use the example structured formula below if you know the path directory...

=Excel.Sheet.12|'C:\Users\Me\Desktop\Example 1.xlsx'!'!Sheet1!R5C4'

[dicom75886549]

I'll just write a VBA to do it automatically. It's faster at the moment for the testing purpose, but thanks for the suggestion.

[dicom75886549]

Still slow, this feature is just poorly coded and probably doesn't use the CPU and threads with enough efficiency, as expected from Adobe developers.

[Eternal Warrior]

Do you have other programmes open when trying to update the InDesign document? Specifically any not relevant to the task?

What status does Task Manager display when you try and do this 30 Min Update? Any programmes show that they are crashing/frozen? Is CPU / Memory / Disk use full?

Where is the Excel file stored? Is it local or is it stored on a networked drive?

[dicom75886549]

No, I close all running programs. I did monitor it with Task Manager. InDesign barely uses all cores and even the ones it uses are not utilized to the fullest.