How To Avoid A Bug Splat When Importing From Excel

fcborik · 14 Oct 2013, 21:28

Hello,

I've been having some unfortunate experiences with importing Excel into my Layout drawings. I like to use spreadsheets, especially for things like structural calculations, but on several occasions, the import would get all scrambled, and then I tried to re-size it, the characters would collapse into a very tiny mess of characters, and then I would get a bug splat shortly thereafter. This last time, I noticed that I had some inconsistencies in my font styles and sizes within the imported data. Once I corrected that, everything worked great. And, although this doesn't seem to cause a bug splat, I found that merged cells don't import very well either.

So, two lessons learned: (1) Don't try to import a bunch of mongrel fonts (I hate inconsistent fonts anyway, so maybe this "helps" me) and (2) don't try to import merged cells.

Hope this is helpful.

Frank Borik

Dave R · 14 Oct 2013, 22:50

At this time the only text files that LayOut is officially intended to take are RTFs. I think you've hit on a couple of points but you'll probably get better results if you copy your table from Excel and paste it in a blank Word doc. Most projects I do in LayOut involve at least one table. The data is exported from SketchUp as a CSV file which I massage and rearrange in Excel before going to Word. I dislike the appearance of the straight tables so I convert tables to tab-separated text. Usually I do a few other things in Word including pasting in some boilerplate text before saving as an RTF file. This file imports into LayOut flawlessly and as long as I remember not to try editing it in LO directly, I can always open it for editing in Word.

It seems like a convoluted path but for me it is workable. I've done so many of them now that the steps are sort of a process I can do quite rapidly.