XML Fields and Tags not Mapping when imported to Indesign

[merbeast]

I have saved my Excel spreadsheet as an XML file, it has basic fields (last_name, first_name, initial, etc.)

None of the fields have mapped instead I get this...

I'm not sure if I'm saving incorrectly or if this is an issue with InDesign

[Loic.Aigon]

Importing XML doesn't do much if you don't have tagged items accordingly inside InDesign…

As Workbook is the root, the bare minimimum would be to attach the root to a frame so contents gets placed as is…

However if you expect excel tables to be ported inside indesign, you need more than converting excel document to XML. You need to translate the excel XML semantics to InDesign XML semantics.

That can be done with XSLT but it will probably be very tedious. I tried to achieve that goal years ago and the main issue is that Excel consider spreadsheets as one and unique table. So you can have dozens of tables inside one sheet and they eventually be all but cells inside a collection of cells.

But keep up the good work and feel free to show your progress if you can succeed having something strongly functional here. believe me I will be the first one to applause

[MW Design]

CALS tables are easy enough with an XSLT or XSL. Combined with table styles as one runs through the document  (or scripted for applying table styles) it is just a bit of grunt work.

I have an XSLT for converting CALS to aid tables somewhere as well.

I only have a couple jobs a year using XML any more. The others have all been converted to exporting tagged text.

The xml editor I use can simply open an Excel or csv file and convert to XML as well. And there are on-line converters for csv to xml.

Without seeing the layout, I dunno whether processing as plain XML is better than as tables or even csv or tagged text.

[Loic.Aigon]

That's certainly achievable. I was sharing my experience where xslt transformations might not properly work if excel sheets host mixed contents. You can visually see several tables but this is not semantically outputted in teh xml structure as there is one and only table for excel which is the sheet itself.

I could get nice result with one table starting at A1 to A…:N but then add some tables here and there and it was over.

But I would be happy to be wrong.