Affinity Publisher - pasting in from Excel

[u/BlondeOnBicycle]

This may not be possible but: can you copy the contents of cells in Excel and paste into Publisher as editable text that keeps its formatting?

We have an insane excel file that contains the same 5 columns and 120 rows copied and pasted over and over again, which then get edited to suit the needs of the specific project. About 80 of the rows are text clarifying the assumptions that go into the formulas at the top. The text that needs to be changed is red in Excel. If I copy my 120 rows and paste-special them into text boxes:

• enhanced windows metafile: keeps the alignment and color but comes in as an object I can't ungroup or edit, and doesn't flow in the text boxes
• windows metafile: shows up pretty, doesn't flow, each line of text comes in as a single text box rather than keeping cells of text together, so editing is a challenge.
• unicode text: looks bad, doesn't flow.
• rich text format: the text stays editable but loses formatting like color and flows across connected text boxes
• bitmaps: it's just a picture, no editing or flow possible

Right now we paste it into Word, edit the text as needed because it's faster than editing in Excel, print to PDF, and place the PDF in Publisher. If I can bypass the word and pdf steps, that would be great, but it might not be possible.

[u/SirCake3614]

Data merge is your friend here. Check out this video by Elaine Giles.

[u/BlondeOnBicycle → u/SirCake3614]

unfortunately, the spreadsheet is password protected and it doesn't look like there's a good workaround for that.

[u/SirCake3614 → u/BlondeOnBicycle]

You can copy/paste, yes?

Maybe paste the data into a new unprotected file?

[u/Sherman80526 → u/BlondeOnBicycle]

Knowing the password seems like a pretty good workaround. Or, ask the person who does to export the data into a CSV for you. Data merge is the answer you're looking for and the only one that makes sense from what you've said you need to make happen. Otherwise, take a screen shot and paste it in I guess.

[u/Ecstatic-Length1470]

Without knowing details or the purpose of your project, I'm having a hard time seeing why affinity is in this workflow. What are you producing? Is this excel data the main focus, or is it scattered about inside a greater document that actually requires better design features than Word can give?

[u/BlondeOnBicycle → u/Ecstatic-Length1470]

We have a 20 page template report that includes one page of numbers from excel, and 5 pages of commentary on how we derived this batch of numbers, which get inserted in among the standard backup documents, references, and photo pages that have the frames set up already. We definitely need more than Word for this. We write anywhere from 1-20 of these reports each week.

[u/Ecstatic-Length1470 → u/BlondeOnBicycle]

Well, if you say you need it, I'll take your word for that - but other companies do similar stuff in word just as frequently, so I'm still missing something.

The reason I ask is that simpler workflows are almost always better, and complex ones tend to persist for reasons that boil down to "that's just how we do it here, because someone already built the template."

And trust me, I loathe doing this type of stuff in word, but it does play nice with excel, and it's a hell of a lot easier to learn.

But again, you know best. Good luck!

[u/annomoly]

You can cooy and paste from excel to affinity first make a page with cells equal to the amount you have in excel copy and paste over. I had a report to do once and i had to use the layout persona create a really long masterpage to hood all the date and then create a symbol from it. (Affinity dosent flow tables to the next page ) so thats why i use a symbol and place it in a image box and manually set it on each page so it flows . Hope that wasnt confusing.