Hi,
I'm trying to link content from a table cell to various other places on my indesign document. Our company manufactures accessories and each item has a myriad specifications and forms (most of which repeat information found on other forms), I'm trying to devise a system where all the information goes into one form, and the other forms are linked to the relevant data- instead of manually having to fill in the same information on several forms (and raising the likelihood of mistakes).
I set up a master page which contains a table with all relevant specifications and I had hoped to link cells to elsewhere in the document. It didnt seem possible to link individual cells, so I tried dropping text boxes into the cells and linking those. I was able to link them outside of the table, but the linked boxes arnt updating when I 'update all links'.
In the above image you'll notice that I had content collected the box associated with 'style #:' and linked it outside of the table. When I changed the value to 'style12345' and hit update all links, the linked box retained the original value of 'style1234'. I don't have any problem linking text boxes when the table isnt involved, but I like the functionality offered by tables (all below lines dropping when I have a line break, selecting all text in a cell without selecting the category).
If anyone can help with my issue or suggest another means of accomplishing the same goal, I'd be thrilled to hear it.
Best,
David
32
Replies
This is what I've got. The top text box has my style # variable, the bottom text box uses the style # paragraph style, and contains the text 'asdasd'. Given that the variable says it grabs the first text on the page, I expected that this is all that needed doing, but as you can see my variable isnt updating.
Yeap!
Do you mean this?
[On left] The table is on a specific master page. [On right] Current pages with text.
If you change the table content as done in the second screenshot, only 1 click to update the current text!
(^/)
I'm not quite sure what you've done- would you mind clarifying your process for me?
Just to update everyone on what I've tried so far, I have two versions which both have cons:
The version which uses linked text boxes which arnt placed in a table and thus doesn't offer the functionality of a table.
This version is one of the forms with text variables which would be filled by rolling header paragraph styles (placed inside of a table) defined on a previous page. Being that text variables are a single character, my entries are unable to line break.
Imho, don't use "variables" or "text frames links", just simply cross-references!
Really simple!
At the moment, no time to explain more! Maybe vinny38 could finish! 
(^/)
This is whats happening when I replace a referenced cells contents (with ctrl-A), or attempt to reference an empty cell. I get a flag indicating that the reference is missing.
When you create a link as the CR, ID inserts a "blue-metachar" marker ":"
If you replace "Sith" by "Jedi", take care to not remove this marker!
Yes we could write, if time, a script that would find all the contents of this 2nd column on this master page, search each term in the current pages, e.g. as: "Sith" and replace them by the corresponding cross-reference (to be created) to make the link!
Just 1 click!
… But, personally, no time!
(^/)
Pickysticks wrote:
That being said, the solution I reach will have to be one which doesnt require my coworkers to use find/change, or access any of indesigns tools. Data must simply be entered into a cell and processed. They arnt at all familiar with the program.
@jane-e I'd be interested in hearing whether you think data merge would be a viable solution. If you think it could work I'll certainly give it a try.
Try Data Merge on a small sample and see if it works
https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/data-merge.html
The panel is pretty self explanatory, and if any one has done Mail Merge in Word, they know the concept. You edit the data in Excel, and merge a base document into a new document.
So I've got the basic idea of data merge down and its certainly promising. I'm wondering now if theres any way to make the excel spreadsheet look more like a table so that entering data is less confusing (being limited to a column header and a value in the following row makes for a very long/unwieldy excel doc).
The only thought that comes to mind is that I could potentially link a normal looking excel spreadsheets cells to my data merge base- inputting data on the normal sheet and having it be reflected in the data merge doc, and finally on indesign.
Any ideas?
Hi there,
If you intend to use the Data merge feature - which looks like a good idea in regard of many of your considerations - you should keep a couple of things in mind:
Yes, the idea is first to create an good-looking Excel document (XLS, XLSX, XLSM...), meaning with identified headers, table style and so on... All datas will be stored here, and this is the file that your colleagues will work with. Nice and easy.
Pros (non-exhaustive) :
- You can lock cells, in order to avoid unwanted modifications. I.e. locking headers is a good start since Data merging process is based on those headers.
- You can add image paths to your document. See Merge data > Image paths
- You can use macros
- Excel Filters are very helpful to display the products you want to append
- You only need to create one document : what you call the "data merge doc" is just a "save as" copy of this document, that will be saved in a specific type : CSV or TXT basically.
- Centralizing data into Excel doc may be useful to output XML documents that could be used on a website.
- Using the Index + Equiv formula in Excel, combined with locked cells will give you great control of your datas, minimizing risks
Cons/warnings (non-exhaustive😞
- You can't work with sub-levels. See index + equiv point above.
- You can't place several values in one cell. Never use hard returns, meaning your colleagues must be aware of that.
- Warning: Don't use commas in text if you intend to save as CSV. Same comment about colleagues
- Now, the most important thing: Using data merge means that you must work with a unique INDD Layout. Is it exactly what you want? One page per product (product = 1 excel line). All informations should fit in this page. Since you haven't showed us how the intended result should look like, it is still hard to confirm Data merge is the right work around. The following quote is quite unclear to me:
I'm trying to link content from a table cell to various other places on my indesign document
Hope that helps, let us know if you manage to go through this.
Vinny
Thanks for the information Vinny!
Soft brakes have been applied to my project as we're getting busy with designs at the moment. This is more of a side thing that I don't think my manager would fully appreciate until its complete. We're pretty disorganized.
Now that I'm back in the office I'll share some screengrabs of some of our forms, to give you guys a better understanding of what I'm working with.
So, these are few of the forms I work with, and the excel documents I've been working on.
The bottom excel document is my csv file, and I had attempted to define names which linked to cells in the organized excel file on top. I put the names in each of the csv files cells and saved the file, only to find that the csv wouldn't retain the name information- only the final value. I suppose using a non csv while structured in the same way, and saving the file as csv when outputting data would work, but I'm guessing there are less cumbersome solutions.
When I'm more free to work on this project I'll see what I can do with your suggestions, Vinny, and will report back here. Thanks!
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