InStep: Excel to InDesign Via XML

Chad Chelius

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Excel is a great application for capturing and managing data. But for maximum flexibility, XML is often a more robust choice for InDesign workflows.

This article appeared in Issue 88 of InDesign Magazine.

Most InDesign users know that Excel spreadsheets can be placed into an InDesign document, and rendered as native InDesign tables. This is an excellent solution when you want a table-based structure in your final design. But what if you don’t want to mimic a spreadsheet?

Recently I was creating a directory of information based on data from a spreadsheet, and the client wanted the information to “flow” in a layout, instead of being listed as a table. In the past, I’ve saved Excel files as .csv or tab-delimited files, and then run some creative GREP searches to achieve the desired result. But that still left me with a lot of manual formatting to do. I love nested styles in InDesign, but they require very consistent content, with “triggers” that allow me to determine how content within a paragraph is formatted. If you don’t have consistent content from one paragraph to the next, nested styles just don’t work.

Now you might say that Data Merge would be a logical choice, and it works well for some projects. But Data Merge alone doesn’t allow you to create flowing text, and it requires each field to be a separate text frame. Loic Aigon wrote a handy script called InlineMerge to overcome this limitation, but I still wanted a bit more control.

XML gives me the ability to import content into InDesign in a story format, and provides the control that I need to style content based on tags in the XML file, instead of specific characters in the content.

Editor’s note: See issues 23 and 24 for a full rundown of XML workflows.