After many months in the making and an extensive beta test we are pleased to release our latest addition to our line of Microsoft Office productivity add-ins.
As its name implies, PowerMerge is a “mail merge” utility for PowerPoint. It is used to create presentations from a template and data contained in a workbook created with Excel.
Learn more | Download an evaluation version | Purchase PowerMerge
On my consulting business, I do a lot of data sharing between Excel and InDesign.
I know that InDesign tables have very powerful formatting options, but my reports usually contain dozens of interconnected tables that have to be created in Excel (because they contain financial calculations). Excel does provide with enough formatting options to create great looking tables that integrate nicely with the layout of my reports, while InDesign, of course, lacks any calculation power.
Download now Metafile eXpert, or continue reading to know the whole story about effectively working with Excel tables in InDesign.
InDesign provides two "modes" of handling the clipboard as shown below. The options are available (in Windows systems) in Edit > Preferences > Clipboard handling …
You really should not copy and paste tables created in Excel to InDesign using the Text Only mode. If you don’t follow my advice and do it, the table is converted to text, with each row in a line, and columns separated by tabs. This is hardly useful.
It is necessary to completely reformat the table in InDesign, and merged cells usually create problems. But the worse news is, whenever the original data changes (and believe me, it will), you have to copy, paste and reformat it again from scratch. Definitely a no-no.
Ok, so what happens if you try the first option, ‘Paste All information’. That looks more promising.
In this case, what InDesign does is to try and convert the Excel table into an InDesign table, thriving to retain all formatting information it can.
As seen above, if you take the precaution of hiding gridlines in Excel, the result is no so bad.
[BTW, I always hide the gridlines anyway, because I find they are distracting when working with Excel, so it is not a big deal for me.]
InDesign really does a great job of converting the Excel table into a InDesign table. There are still a few glitches, like the width and height of cells not being maintained, the vertical alignment being odd and, again, problems with merged cells. So, even if the result is fairly good, you will have to manually tweak and adjust the conversion. And this means that you will have to reformat tables again whenever the underlying information changes. Not really a viable solution.
The problem lies in that, even though Excel pastes to the clipboard the data in mutiple formats, InDesign only uses two of these formats: The internal Excel clipboard format to create an InDesign table, or the text only format, to create a tab delimited text object.
But there is a third way which involves using the metafile format. What is a metafile? Is a vector file format that has been used in Windows, at least since Windows 3.0. Being a vector format means that it has maximum quality. And it provides a really good rendition of the original formatting of the spreadsheet because it is the format that is used by Excel itself to print a spreadsheet on some printers.
The funny thing (so to speak) is that InDesign does understand metafiles (in fact, most applications do) but it ignores it unless it is the only available format.
Excel provides a little known trick to remove all other clipboard formats and publish only a metafile. How do you do it? To put it mildly, it is not terribly intuitive in Excel 2007. The following screen shot shows how to do it:
You will get better results selecting the ‘As shown when printed’ option. You may have noticed that Excel is not a perfect WYSIWIG ("What you see is what you get") application. Selecting this option means that Excel will effectively compose the metafile as if it were printing the selected range.
Usually, it doesn’t really matter which Appearance option you select.
The Format options are more important. As you can see, when using the ‘As printed’ option you can’t choose a Format, because Excel forces the Picture format for you (remember I told you Excel uses metafiles to print?). But in case you decide to use ‘As shown on screen’, you have to absolutely make sure that you stick to the Picture format (in case you are wondering, picture is a MS synonym for metafile).
You don’t want to use a bitmap. Believe me.
It is fairly easy to create a macro in Excel to replicate all these clicks and selections and copy the selected cells as metafile to the clipboard to paste it afterwards in InDesign. In fact that is what I did in the past, with good results.
What happens when the table changes? Easy, for each table yo need to update, you repeat the process in Excel, then turn to InDesign, delete the old table, paste it again, and back to Excel. Easy … but tedious.
[NOTE: Of course, if you are a brave person, you can try to link the table in InDesign. I am not brave enough myself and have been avoiding using linking since the very day Microsoft invented it, but you might be different]
To streamline the process, a couple of years ago I created a personal quick and dirty utility to capture the metafile format posted by Excel to the clipboard (remember that Excel always publishes metafiles when copying to the clipboard) and save it to disk. Then, I’d "place" the metafile in InDesign, as I would any other external "asset".
Recently I have been investigating the clipboard in more detail for an upcoming add-in I am working with, (the name is WordClip and it is a boilerplate repository for Word). As a result I have greatly enhanced my little metafile utility and decided to release it to the world as a freeware utility. If you work with Excel tables in InDesign you absolutely must get it. And the price is quite reasonable!
You can see below a screen shot of Metafile eXpert.
So, what are you waiting for?
Please Contact me if you find Metafile eXpert useful. And be sure to let me know your suggestions to make it even more productive.
Metafile eXpert saves metafiles using the Enhanced Meta Files format, with the extension EMF. When you open the Place dialog you wont see the metafiles, because Adobe has not included EMF as one of the extensions in the default "Importable files" option. Therefore you have to select the "Windows Enhanced Meta Files" in the Place dialog.
I have uploaded a new version of FormsAssistant that includes the following three changes to the product:
Note that the last two features have been added as an option because processing headers, footers and text boxes results in a noticeable delay in the processing of documents.
Please visit the download page to get the new version.
This will be the last 1.x version of FormsAssistant. I have just started the development of version 2. Most of the new features have been already implemented and tested, so the new version development will mostly consist in integrating these features on the main application. Therefore I expect beginning the beta test sometime during the next month of September.
I have finally uploaded Control Runner v4.0. Although the program has been finished for at least two months now, several issues (not related to Control Runner per se) have prevented me from releasing it earlier.
For that reason, I want to apologize to all my users that have been contacting me lately wanting to know what was happening.
I have to say that I have been using fairly stable 4.0 versions since the start of the year, so I have almost forgotten how was Control Runner 3.4, but for those of you that have not participated in the beta test, I am sure you are going to love the new version.
I have decided to provide a free upgrade to all users that purchased the product after 1/1/2008 since I originally planned to release version 4 at the beginning of this year.
Users that purchased Control Runner before that date will have a 60% discount
In the next few days, the new customer portal will be live. This will be the preferred way to get the free upgrade keys or the link to the special upgrade price. Meanwhile, please Contact me to get instructions.
Again, thank you very much for your patience.
I have just uploaded a new version of FormsAssistant that solves a problem reported by one user. Apparently, on 1.7.5 the multiline editor of the Main window was causing an error.
Please download the new version and install it over your current version of FormsAssistant. It is not necessary to uninstall it previously.
Last week, I finally set my new web site live. I have been busy fine tuning it, fixing everything that was broken, but finally it seems to be working alright.
This is how the new site looks:
And this is how it was before:
What do you think? Do you like it better the new one?
The complete revamp of the web site is almost finished. The new site looks really professional and I am sure it will help with sales. I will show the first draft of the homepage next week.
Anyway, I thought I needed to take advantage of the new copy of the web site to create some flyers for my products to try to get some off-line sales. I also think that they will help the online business because they are a great way of presenting your product to a prospect customer that can simply download, print and show it to the purchasing department (or the person that takes the decision).
Therefore, I have created one flyer for each one and I am liking them a lot, and I have enjoyed the experience so much that I am seriously considering turning this activity into a new line of business.
The deal is as follows. I will create the final art, ready to print of a three fold flyer of your software product for a flat fee of $400 if you provide the copy. I can also work out the copy but in this case you will have to ask for a quote first.
If you are interested, please visit brochures.momsoftco.com for details of the offer.
Here are samples of all four brochures (click to enlarge):
And the high quality PDF files are available here:
PowerTOC 2.2.4 and FormsAssistant 1.7.5 have been released today. These minor upgrades just solve a minor issue with the Check Install utility that was reporting a security error on Microsoft Office 2007 systems.
(The setup check utility showing a security error)
The security problem was reported on all systems where the default security settings had not being changed, the problem has been solved on version 1.1 of the Setup Check utility that has been added to the new versions of PowerTOC and FormsAssistant.
The second build of Control Runner v4 Beta has just been released!
Registered beta testers should have received a notification email with the download link. If you have not yet registered as a beta tester, you can use our Contact form to notify us your interest in becoming a tester.
This build does not add many features to the previous one. The main reason for releasing it is that some of our testers have reported that the previous beta expired on their systems. Therefore I have reset the trial period on this build, therefore granting another full 90 days to test the program.
That’s all for now. Thank you very much for all your comments!
This should be the first time in my life that I have completed a programming tasks in less time than what I had originally anticipated!
For that reason, I have just released the first beta version of Control Runner 4 a week before expected.
I have been posting the most important new features of Control Runner in three previous posts. Please take a look at them if you haven’t seen them already:
Apart from the above, the program is mostly stable. I have been using version 4 in all our XP computers for a couple of weeks and experienced no problems. Preliminary tests on Vista are also positive.
If you want to help us with the new version of Control Runner, I encourage you to participate in the beta test.
You will get a Free version valid for 90 days, and, if your contribution is significant you can get the new version for free, forever!
To participate in the beta test, please send us a message using our Contact form.