Should I publish straight from Excel or should I use Indesign?

[mihaib68108144]

Hello everyone!

Some of my colleagues and me, we are working on an university project which requires doing an updated version of this document here: http://advocacy.ro/sites/advocacy.ro/files/files/publicatie/indrumar_randament_politic_electronic1.p... 

We do not know how the original authors created that first version, but we were thinking of using Microsoft Excel to gather our data for the tables and charts. There are options in Excel to use a pages view and we could do most of the work straight from inside Excel, and then export as a PDF.

My question is: should we just use Excel or should we use Indesign afterwards? How would you approach this? Are there advantages to importing the data from Excel into Indesign?

Thank you very much! 

Bogdan Mihai

[Derek Cross · Accepted solution]

This is an attractively laid out document. I doubt whether you could produce such a design using just Excel. You could easily produce this in InDesign and export it as a PDF for printing and circulating for on-screen viewing. But InDesign is a professional DTP application and you need the skills to be able to use it.

[mihaib68108144]

Thank you for your answer, Derek! I am pretty familiar with Indesign, but I'm not sure if it is really necessary to use it in this case.

[BobLevine]

That’s like asking whether you should use a hammer or a saw. You’re going to need both.

[jane-e]

This document was made from eight PDFs and then put together with the Combine PDFs feature. If you can get hold of any of the original PDFs, you can look in Properties to see what program was used to create them. I don't know if this will help, since it's been a few years.