Podcast 67 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 67 page.
[music]
David Blatner: Happy Holidays.
Anne-Marie Concepcion: [laughter]. Welcome to InDesignSecrets, episode 67. I’m Anne-Marie Concepcion and I’m here along with my jolly co-host David Blatner.
David: [laughter] Ho, Ho, Ho.
Anne-Marie: Hi there.
David: Hi there [laughter].
Anne-Marie: That’s right it’s just a few days before Christmas here and you know people might not be listening to this until July, 2009.
David: That’s true. It’s a good point. Well, happy July [laughter].
Anne-Marie: Our podcast and blog at InDesignSecrets.com are the independent resource for all things in design.
David: Yes indeed and we’ve got a bunch of stuff to talk about today including a couple new books and a video that’s out and we’re going to talk about the InDesign conference coming up in Miami or if you’re listening to this in July then the InDesign conference that was in Miami and we’re going to talk about XML.
Finally it’s taken 67 episodes but we’re going to talk a little bit about XML and cover some bases and then the obscure InDesign feature of the week which will be formatted only once, so that’s actually a non-XML topic, so even if you don’t care about XML you are going to want to listen to the end for that obscure design feature. So, books. There are a couple of books out.
Anne-Marie: There are a couple of books, I have them right here by my side, this is what geeks do during Christmas vacation is they read books on InDesign in front of the television and they’re in the bathroom, they’re on the kitchen table. One of them is from my good friend Jim Mavald and Cathy Palmer, A Designers Guide to Adobe InDesign and XML. This is exactly what we have all needed for the past three years.
David: Or longer.
Anne-Marie: Or longer. Well, for InDesign XML, I mean, I know that some people they never encounter the need for XML at all in their lives, they’re like, what’s the big deal? But for me, I work a lot with publishers doing InDesign and incopy or just regular designers who are working for large firms and they are all over XML, they want to know, how can we move to XML and how can we work with XML, our clients want us to work with XML and the answers are in this book, really.
It’s a really great book and it steps you through how do you create XML like in Excel or Office, or even Filemaker, what is XML, of course? How do you import it into InDesign and how do you export it out of InDesign? How do you create websites using XML from InDesign? How do you create recipes and Prada catalogues and all sorts of stuff and what I especially like is that they highlight in orange like the designers 15 rules for XML, like, number one, you do not enter spaces in words or enter spaces in XML names but they have some really great useful tips that I don’t think are documented any where else for working with XML and InDesign.
David: Well, the other thing that’s really nice is that it’s both conceptual under-pitting like what is XML? What do you need to do for XML? But there are also actual practical lessons in there. He’s broken it down into actual step by step lessons and you can download those files from page on the website which is very cool so all-in-all a very good book and I think we can both say big thumbs up. Thank you Jim and Cathy for getting that out the door finally.
The other book is Gabriel Powell’s, Instant InDesign which is all about InDesign templates, so if you’re the kind of person who either builds templates for others or you need to open templates and work with templates, you should definitely check out this book. Instead of looking at the whole of InDesign it just looks at, what do you need to build a good template or to work with a good template and it also is very good and there’s download files and so on.
Anne-Marie: And he goes into quite a bit of depth. Although he does talk about templates, it’s more sort of like setting up a production workflow, like planning ahead to create documents, so it’s obviously with templates but also about using grids and object styles and table styles and generating style sheets and getting all that set up beforehand using libraries for efficient and accurate and quick production and he has a pretty useful chapter on XML, automating layouts with XML toward the end of the book.
David: It’s mostly based on a session he gave at the InDesign conference a couple of years ago in San Francisco and although he extended it to newer stuff and that is very useful and the other think about this book…
I think it looks like a very good book to me from what I’ve read of it but the one thing about templates is so much of template work is personal, that is, it depends on what you’re doing and everyone has their own needs and so on, so he does a good job at generalizing it and he does go into some detail and he, I thought, some of the things there like, what do you really need to watch out for before you finalize a template and hand it over to someone and how do you check over a template?
Some of that is very good but still you are going to have to bring your own needs and your own interpretations and so on to the table while you are reading this.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. So, two great books to add to your library. We’ll have links to them in our show notes and in our recommended books page on InDesign Secrets.com and then there is a video, an interesting video that you saw recently David.
David: I did see it recently. I saw this recently courtesy of Anne-Marie who…thank you very much Anne-Marie. So, you sent me…Santa Claus sent me a copy of the documentary, Helvetica all about our favorite or not favorite type faced, depending on who you are, Helvetica and I watched it last night with my wife and a sort of Christmas viewing and it was really fun.
You know, as a documentary it meanders a little bit here and there and so on but it’s not like long, it’s a nice short sweet look at Helvetica and type and history in the 20th century of type and where type has gone and where it’s been in recent history and the best part about it for me was hearing these wonderful designers get very opinionated, have very strong opinions about, this is great or this is terrible, not just about Helvetica but also about design in general and I very much appreciated that and it was fun to see Eric Speakerman, David Carson, all these people just kind of really go on about type, so I definitely would recommend anybody taking a look at this documentary and we’ll put a link in there and the show notes as well but it’s definitely worth watching.
Anne-Marie: I’ve got to sit my dad down in front of that, you know I’ll never forget this; one time he and I went out to lunch maybe about five years ago, I’d been in business for about 10 years already and I was looking at the menu and I mentioned something about the design of the menu and he said, so do you design menu’s? And I’m like, well, I have for clients but it’s not really the main thing. He goes, what is it exactly that you do?
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Right and so I’m trying to explain what a graphic designer does and he’s from a completely different world, he’s a doctor and he has no time for, I guess, artistic creativity, well, he likes opera and things like that but anyway he just couldn’t get it through his head what a graphic designer does and I was like, everything that you see printed here was done, somebody had to make a decision about the colors, about the size of the paper, somebody had to decide before it was sent to the printer what it should look like. Everything that you see that’s printed. They had to choose the typeface and he’s like, what are you talking about and it turns out it never occurred to him there is more than one typeface.
David: Sure, sure. Because you just don’t see it.
Anne-Marie: There’s printing and there’s cursive, and that’s the end of it.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: No, I know exactly what you mean. In fact–this was back in the old QuarkXPress days–I did a seminar where a guy came from a print house to the seminar, and halfway through the seminar, he said, “This is the first time that I’ve ever noticed the difference between Times and Helvetica.”
Anne-Marie: Wow.
David: This guy had been printing for years. He had been printing other people’s work.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. [laughs]
David: But he never really looked at the page. I think you don’t see that as much these days because so many people have their favorite font or whatever.
Anne-Marie: Right, that’s true. That’s true. That’s true.
David: They have opinions about it. But that is the kind of thing that this documentary, “Helvetica” looks at. What is the meaning of type? How does it make it feel? And what does it mean to choose a font or to choose a different font? Why would you want to do one or the other? So I really appreciate that, with a designer’s background and also a non-designer’s background. So I think anyone is really going to enjoy that.
Anyways, let’s move on, talk about other stuff. The conference in Miami coming up, InDesign Conference, I just wanted to point out the InDesign Conference, as you probably know, is alongside the Pixel Conference and the Vector Conference, and also the conference for Adobe Acrobat users.
Anne-Marie: Cool.
David: So, if you do PDF or Flash or Illustrator or Photoshop or InDesign or whatever, you’re going to find a lot during that week in Miami, the last week of February in Miami, alongside the GOA show, the Graphics of America show.
Anne-Marie: My problem is: how are people supposed to decide which seminar to go to?
David: I know. It’s totally…
Anne-Marie: I went to the web page for the InDesign Conference, and there’s like six tracks, six different speakers at the same time.
David: Yeah, yeah.
Anne-Marie: And that’s just for the InDesign, Vector, and Pixel Conference.
David: Yeah, it’s totally overboard.
Anne-Marie: Not including the Acrobat Conference. It’s crazy.
David: Yeah. It’s like six tracks every day for five days. But there’s a lot of good…
Anne-Marie: The one seminar that everybody has to make sure and attend is our live podcast.
David: That’s true!
Anne-Marie: We’re doing a live podcast again.
David: That’s right, one more time. It’s going to be much of fun. Come on down to Miami and be part of our live studio audience, which will be great.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: Hey, another seminar which I wanted to mention is, if you go to the conference, if you’re signed up for the InDesign Conference, there’s going to be a full-day seminar on how to do math typesetting in InDesign. And it’s being sponsored and presented by Rudi Warttmann at i.t.i.p. They make the InMath plug-in, which is a wonderful plug-in for doing math typesetting in InDesign.
So he’s basically doing a full-day tutorial on math typesetting, what you need to think about, and then especially how to use, of course, his plug-in to do math in InDesign. So that’s going to be very cool as well. I recommend anyone who has to do mathematical typesetting to come down and make sure you sit in on that session. So that’ll be great.
But we’ve got a lot of other speakers as well. Ted Padova is coming in to do a whole thing on Acrobat forms, which is exciting.
Anne-Marie: Excellent.
David: Burtman Roy is going to be doing his thing. Katrina Eisman and Eddie Tapp are both coming in to do wonderful stuff for the Pixel Conference. So it’s going to be quite the week, all around. So I hope we’ll see all of you there. It’s going to be lots of fun.
OK. So we should talk about… We’re not really going to talk about XML, are we? [laughs]
Anne-Marie: “Zimmel.” I prefer to pronounce it “Zimmel.”
David: “Zimmel” is actually too close to XAML. And XAML is a totally different thing.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: XAML is a Microsoft flavor of XML. It’s actually written in XML. But XAML is a totally different thing. So you can’t say “Zammel.”
Anne-Marie: OK. I can’t say “Zimmel”?
David: “Zimmel” is something you might get at a Jewish deli.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: “I’ll pick up a nosh of a Zimmel.”
Anne-Marie: I thought it was a city in Mexico.
David: It could be that, too. Is it?
Anne-Marie: Uh-huh, yeah. I don’t know. They have a lot of those funny names.
David: They do. They do.
Anne-Marie: All right. So, actually, XML. Yes, let’s talk about it.
David: XML.
Anne-Marie: What does it stand for, XML?
David: Extensible Markup Language.
Anne-Marie: Yay!
David: There you go.
Anne-Marie: Congratulations. You get a star.
David: Thank you!
Anne-Marie: Yep. And, like HTML, a markup language is a way to tag text with codes to identify it for some kind of purpose. Like, with HTML, you can have a tag called H1 that, when a browser sees that, it automatically formats the type enclosed by that tag in the Header one style, which is usually bold in a large typeface. HTML has a set of predefined tags that you surround plain text with. And all HTML is a plain text file, just like XML is a plain text file.
But the tags in XML are not limited to the ones in HTML. In fact, you usually don’t use the HTML tags in XML. The tags that you use in XML usually denote the type of content. Like, surrounding an author’s name, instead of surrounding it with tags like, say, italic or the name of your style sheet, you’d surround it with tags like “author.”
David: Right. And specifically, in XML, you’re tagging what something is, not what it looks like. You try and avoid, as much as possible, what this thing should look like, because you don’t even know what it’s going to look like. All you’re trying to say is, “This is author. This is a city. This is a zip code.” Whatever. And later on down the line, all of those things could be translated into something that looks like something or not.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: But all you’re doing is tagging.
Anne-Marie: We should explain what a tag is exactly, too, for people who are completely new. A tag, for both HTML and XML and all these kind of tagging languages, is just text that’s surrounded by a less-than sign and a greater-than sign.
David: Hmm.
Anne-Marie: Right?
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: And so, if the author’s name is David Blatner, then, in front of the word “David” I would add “.” And then, after the word “Blatner” you have closed the tags. Usually in these languages, and definitely in XML, you have to close the tags so that the program knows what the end of this tag is.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: So, after “Blatner” then you’d close it with a less-than symbol, and then I think it’s a slash, and then the same name of the tag, “author.”
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: So, a “/author” and then a greater-than symbol.
David: Exactly. And that says, “The tag is done. We’ve finished that part of it.”
Now, you might also nest tags one inside the other. And you’ll often see virtually all of XML is based on nesting tags. And when you nest tags, you could have that same example, “author” but inside “author” inside those tags that Anne-Marie just described, you might have “first name, ” “David, ” and then close “first name.” And then, “last name” “Blatner” close that tag, and then close the author.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: So, basically, you always can nest one tag inside of another. XML is completely based on all of these tags and creating a hierarchy of nested tags.
Anne-Marie: So, for a catalog, each product, “product” would be a tag, and then inside the product would be “name” “description” “SKU number.” All those would be nested tags within the “product” tag.
David: Right, right. So, what’s the use of XML? Now that we know that you can tag a bunch of content with what it is, why would you want to do that?
Anne-Marie: It’s kind of like the language that can serve as the middleman in between different ways to output the same content. So, if you can get stuff in a database into XML format, with all the opening and closing tags and nested tags, then you could use that XML to create a website, to create an InDesign layout, to create a Word document, because all of those different venues offer ways to interpret XML and convert it into their own proprietary format.
So it’s both for importing into another program, and then, in that program, for exporting out to XML so that you can get it into a different kind of program.
David: Yep. I like that idea of it being a middleman. That’s good. Or a middle-woman. Either one.
Anne-Marie: Middle-person. [laughs]
David: Middle-person. A middle-person.
[laughter]
David: It’s that lingua franca. That’s great.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: In general, I just want to talk a little bit about work flow, who should be using this and who shouldn’t be using this. Anne-Marie, you mentioned earlier that there are all these companies who are jumping up and down saying, “We want to use XML! It’s the future!”
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: When I hear that, I look people right in the eye and say, “Do you REALLY want to use XML? Do you know what that’s really going to mean to use XML?”
In my experience, a lot of people who want to use XML, they don’t really want to use XML and they probably shouldn’t use XML. Just because it is “the thing to do” doesn’t mean you should be doing it or just because you can’t do it, doesn’t mean you should be doing it either. It can be a very painful process.
Anne-Marie: Yes. Oh I think one big deal is that normally XML – and XML can create a layout but it is extremely structured. And InDesign is like the opposite of structured.
David: Well, it depends on what you are creating with InDesign.
Anne-Marie: Well yeah, but normally you are dragging out text frames and dropping in pictures on top and doing text wrap and things on an angle and they don’t really have that much of a relationship to each other as opposed to something like say FrameMaker, which is a very structured layout program.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: So, if you have an unstructured — looks great, the design looks great and it prints great, it separates great, it could still be much unstructured as far as XML is concerned and it would be a huge job to export that to XML. I mean I was just telling David I got a request from somebody over the transom as we say in my email box just a couple of days ago.
And he said, he has got a new client who has 500-page catalog of thousands of products and they want to use InDesign to do the layout of the catalog and then export it to XML to their website. They have no experience in any of this and he is asking me, will InDesign do this task, i.e. if they use the application to create the 500-page catalog, is there an export function that would take that and create XML, so they can upload it to their server for web display on their website as their online catalog.
David: And there are plenty of people who would say, “Yes of course, I mean you could either export XHTML or you could get XML out of InDesign one way or another” but in many cases it is going to cause them more grief than anything.
Anne-Marie: That’s right, especially if the catalog is already designed. If it is not designed yet, then they have a chance to actually to use a design that structures it. Like for example, if you use threaded text frames instead of separate text frames, to separate out like the product name from the product table, that kind of stuff — that will help. Or if you inline graphics as opposed to graphics that are floating, that also helps a great deal toward getting useable XML out of there, otherwise you have to rework that entire layout to get useable XML.
David: Right. So, I just want to go back to the original comment about who should be using it. Typically a catalog, if it is a relatively structured catalog, which is typically a good use for XML. If you have got something like a one-page ad, that is like the worst case scenario for XML. Because as you said, the more structured it is, the more you have got repeated elements over and over and over again for thousands of pages, the better a use it is to set up XML, to use XML.
The other thing I wanted to mention is sort of the workflow question and we just touched on there about this catalog: Everything that is already in InDesign, can we now get it on to a website or into some other format? XML could be good for that, but in general it is better if you start with the XML outside of InDesign. This is something that Olav Kvern, my co-author on Real World InDesign, he wrote the XML chapter for Real World InDesign. I can’t take a lot of credit for that at all.
In fact I just want to be really clear that I am not an XML expert ultimately, I know enough to get myself into trouble and get my way around the program a little bit, but it is not my ultimate specialty. But one of the things Olav has said number of times is that the best case scenario, the XML is already in a database outside of the program and you are dumping the XML into InDesign.
And then the web page, well you take it out of the database and you dump it into a HTML type of workflow. You are not really trying to move stuff through InDesign. Like the idea of getting stuff out of a database into InDesign and then from InDesign out of InDesign onto a web page is going to cause you far more headaches than it would be just to start with it outside of InDesign.
In general, I’d really like to have InDesign be a destination for XML. If it is already in InDesign, there are ways to get it out, but you are going to banging your head on the wall a lot of times.
Anne-Marie: Oh yeah, obviously there are ways, there is an export function and in fact Jim explains pretty well how to get XML, useable XML out of there, but like you said, it is assuming that the design is already structured, either it was created that way or it was imported and laid out from the first place from an XML file.
David: Right. The other thing that is really important, especially if you are trying to get anything out of, well either in or out of InDesign, is you have to be truly obsessive compulsive about styles. So if somebody creates a 1000-page catalog and they “Oops, I forgot to use paragraph and character styles, now can I get XML out?” No, you are lost. I mean it is really a bad scene.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, because there is a feature that will automatically convert the styles that you have applied to XML tags. There is a tags panel in InDesign that — when we were talking before about how you write out a tag, the tags panel will do that automatically for you by just clicking on the name of the tag. So you would either have to manually select text and click on the tag, forget about it, better is if you had like you said, apply your style, paragraph or character style to everything and then you can use the map styles or tags feature, you can do 95 percent of the work.
David: Right. In fact, in general when people do ask me should we be doing XML or how do we transition into XML workflows, I say find the person in your office who is totally insane about styles because every office has one person who will scowl at you, they will come up and yell at you if you didn’t apply a character style or paragraph style and that’s the person who you should put in-charge of the XML workflow.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] that’s right.
David: That’s the person because you have to find those people and if you are not happy working with that kind of person, then XML may not be for you. Because for a really clear clean workflow with XML, you have to obsessive compulsive, you have to be – it has to make you hurt if you don’t use styles properly, if you don’t use tags exactly right because you will get yourself into trouble if you don’t.
Anne-Marie: That’s true. Very good points. Now, we should point out that there are some other resources on our website where we have talked about XML before, like for example in episode 52 of our podcast, remember that we interviewed Cari from Australia?
David: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anne-Marie: And she talked about this project that she did creating a directory of Australian vineyards, like two-page spread or each single page was about a particular vineyard with pictures and a table and text and price lists and things like that. And she said that because they used XML and a couple other database kind of features, but mainly XML, they were able to do the project in 15% of the time of what it had taken in previous years.
David: Yeah, stunning.
Anne-Marie: So, it is one of those kinds of things where you have to do a lot of upfront work, but then from then on, it takes a very short amount of time to get the job done. Then also what else do we – oh I wrote a post about exporting basic HTML out of CS2 and CS3 using the XML panel, the structure panel.
David: Yep.
Anne-Marie: So kind of subverting the main purpose of XML because you can, just like I said, you normally don’t use HTML tags for XML tags; you could if you wanted to. And in the post that I wrote, I explained exactly how you do that and then you can actually get formatted web pages out of CS2 and CS3, which I think worked better even than export to XHTML and CS3.
David: Yeah, I thought that was very clever. Well, it sort of depends again on what your workflow is, but yeah I thought that was very clever, that was really a good way to go. And I guess, I just want to say one other thing about XML before we move on and that is that if you are going to be approaching XML, for most people you should not be thinking about it as an individual trying to take on the whole XML world.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: Most of the successful XML transitions or implementations that I’ve seen are done with a team. You basically find someone who is really a total XML geek, and then you find someone who is an InDesign geek, and you get these people together…
Anne-Marie: And a database geek and an IT geek…
David: Right. And you build a team, because you really need a team. It takes a village, right?
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: It takes a village to do an XML work flow. You’ve got to get all these people working together, or else you’re going to run into trouble. In general, it’s too big to just say, “Oh, I think I’ll just start doing XML today.”
Anne-Marie: Right. I have a couple final thoughts, too.
David: OK, your thoughts.
Anne-Marie: All right. My final thoughts are, if the issue is, “How do we get this database into an InDesign layout?” though XML is the hot word of the century, it doesn’t have to be XML. I mean, there are thousands of companies that are doing fantastic work. If Data Merge, that small mail merge feature in InDesign, can’t do the job for you, then get InData from Em Software.
David: Totally. It’s a great, great point.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: A lot of people say, “We have to use XML because someone told me to.”
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: And I think you’re totally right. Data Merge will work for a lot of people. InData, from Em Software: awesome, awesome program for getting data into InDesign.
Anne-Marie: That’s correct. Right. There are other features like that. And then the other one is, so don’t automatically go to XML and think, “OK, I have to figure out XML in order to do this database.” There are many other solutions available out there. There’s also catalog plug-ins and all sorts of things.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: But the other thing is that I do think that people need to start getting XML in their brains, even though nobody’s inquired about it of them as yet.
I do think it’s what’s coming, in the next five years or so, that because data is being shoveled all over the place these days; XML seems to be the lingua franca that’s winning. And understanding how it works and what you need to do with it in order to make a web page or an InDesign document or a little display on somebody’s phone or turn it into a podcast or a webcast… I mean, our podcast is done by an RSS feed, which is all XML.
David: Right, sure.
Anne-Marie: Right? So you might as well start learning about it now. And the two books that we mentioned and the seminars that we give at the InDesign Conference are all great places to get started with.
David: That’s actually a really good point. One more thing about Miami. Jim Maivald, who wrote the InDesign and XML book, is giving two sessions on XML, plus a full half-day, cross-media work flow with InDesign sessions in Miami. So that alone might be worth getting down there.
Anne-Marie: That’s true.
David: So that’ll be very good.
Anne-Marie: As long as it’s not during the same time as our live podcast.
David: Ooh! We’d better check on that one.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. [laughs]
David: OK. All right.
Anne-Marie: OK. It is time for the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week…
Anne-Marie and David: [together] Eek, eek, eek, eek, eek…
David: Formatted Only Once.
Anne-Marie: This actually came in from an email that an InDesign trainer sent to us. He said, “Do you know what it means?” [laughs]
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: It’s an import option when you’re importing an Excel file, and it’s new in CS3. He can’t figure out what it means. So, actually, we do know what it means, and it is definitely obscure.
So, the purpose is this. First of all, it has to do with when you’re working with Excel files that are linked. And normally, by default, Excel files, when you place them, are not linked, so you have to turn that on in Preferences.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: So, you go to InDesign Preferences, to the–is it the type panel? Yes. At the bottom, it says, “Links. Create links when placing text and spreadsheet files.” Turn that on.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Then place the Excel file. And when you place it, make sure and turn on “Show Options.” And you’ll see there, in the “Show Import Options” dialog box, toward the bottom, under Formatting, next to the table word, there is a popup menu: “Format a Table” “Un-format a Table, ” “Un-format a Tabbed Text” or “Formatted Only Once.” That’s where this obscure feature is hiding, inside the Microsoft Excel import options dialog box.
OK. So you bring in a formatted table, then it’s going to bring in the formatting from Excel as well as the data. And it is going to link to the data as well as the formatting. So, even though you apply your own formatting in InDesign, as soon as you update the Excel file, and then, in the Links panel, update that link, then you’re going to lose any formatting you apply. And it’s going to re-suck in the entire Excel formatting.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Right? So, Formatted Only Once, though, means the first time that you bring it in, it’s going to have the Excel formatting. And that is meant to be used only as a guide, so that you can sort of see the text. If you bring in a lot of these spreadsheets as an unformatted table, you can barely read the thing.
David: Yeah. It’s just too much data. You have no idea what anything is. Sure.
Anne-Marie: Right. Every column is the same width, and there’s text overflows all over the place. So you bring it in as Formatted only once, so you can see it, then you apply your table styles to it. And it has to be table styles. It can’t be local formatting. This only works with table styles. You apply the table styles to it, and then, from then on, when you update the Excel file, as you update the link, it will not link to the formatting anymore.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: It’ll maintain the InDesign table formatting, just update the data. So it’s a slick, cool little feature that’s definitely obscure.
David: It is. It is. And it can be very helpful. Although, to be honest, I get very nervous about the idea of linking Excel or Word files to the file on disk, I think that it has its place. It could be useful. But it can also really cause a great deal of trouble.
For example, if you import an Excel document and it’s linked, and whether you’ve used this format only once or not, if it’s linked–and I think we may have talked about this on a previous podcast–and then you apply formatting to it, and then you go back to Excel and you change the data in there, come back to InDesign, and you say, “Update my link, ” a lot of stuff can get wiped out. Again, as you mentioned, any local formatting gets wiped out. The only thing that’s really reapplied is the table style.
Anne-Marie: All right. Well, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal, though, to lose the header and footers. I mean, all you need to do is select the rows and apply the header and the footer. You could even make a keyboard shortcut for that. What does it take, two seconds?
David: Well, that’s true. If all you’ve done to a table is applying headers and footers, you’re right; it’s not that big of a deal. Sometimes I’ll do local formatting, like on a cell level, change the color of a cell or something, and that’s what bothers me, that that stuff gets wiped out.
Anne-Marie: Oh, you know what? One bugaboo that I should bring up with our Obscure Feature that we forgot to mention was this…
David: Oh, yeah.
Anne-Marie: The first time I tried this out, I went to place the Excel file, and I went to Options and chose Formatted Only Once, and clicked OK, you get this alert that says, “You can speed up the import process by importing the cells as an unformatted table, rather than as a formatted table.”
David: Right. Which is crazy, because you just said you wanted it…
Anne-Marie: [laughs] That’s right. So you might stop reading there and just hit return. And what happens? The table comes in with no formatting from Excel. You’re like, “What did I do wrong?”
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: So I went back, got the alert again, and then this time, I read the entire alert. There was another sentence after that that said, “Do you want to speed up the import process in this way?”
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: And the default is “Yes.”
David: [laughs] Right.
Anne-Marie: So you choose “Bring it in as formatted.” And then the alert, if you hit return, will say, “Oh, forget it. I was wrong. I was an idiot.”
David: Right. Right.
Anne-Marie: So be careful there. Make sure and click “No” at this alert.
David: Right. Make sure you read all of those long alerts carefully.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, I guess so. [laughs]
David: They’re trying to trick you.
Anne-Marie: That’s the lesson there: read the alerts.
David: There’s the lesson: read the alerts.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: There you go. All right. Well, look, that’s it for episode number 67. Be sure to check out the show notes with all the links to various things on our blog at indesignsecrets.com. Also, let us know what you thought of the show. You can leave a comment in the show notes, or email us at info@indesignsecrets.com. And, until we meet again, this is David Blatner and…
Anne-Marie: Anne-Marie Concepcion, for InDesign Secrets.
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