Converting Excel Tables to Structured FM Tables

Thu Dec 2 06:24:46 PST 2010

Thanks everyone for their suggestions! Roger, I'll save your procedure
because I managed to do that once, but couldn't do it again. When I
paste the text, even using paste special, it's so small that it's
unreadable and I freak out and delete it, thinking it's unusable. But if
I select it like you said (double-clicking to the right of the table
element), then everything works out fine.

At the risk of repeating, here's Roger's procedure:
"Then in structured FrameMaker (assuming you're using a CALS table
model):

1. Insert the table element or equivalent, but no child elements. In
CALS the table element is the *container* for the actual table.
2. With your insertion point inside the table element, paste whole text
as unformatted text (Paste Special).
3. Select the whole text (double-click to the right of the table
element).
4. On the Table menu, choose Convert to Table.
5. Choose the Tab option, and the tgroup (or whatever) element. Only
those elements that are valid at this spot will appear as options.
Choose the number of heading rows.
6. Click Convert."

Gary, the XML conversion is a novel idea. If I have a lot of these to do
next time, I might give that a try.

In the meantime, I went with pasting the Excel tables into unstructured
FrameMaker, then using a conversion table on them. It took me about an
hour to get the conversion table right (I'm a bit rusty), but I'll save
it for next time. The trick is to put it somewhere that I can find two
years from now! And I think that Roger's way might be faster.

Fei Min

-----Original Message-----
From: Etzel, Gary [mailto:Gary.Etzel at gl-group.com] 
Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2010 9:01 AM
To: Roger Shuttleworth; Fei Min Lorente
Cc: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: RE: Converting Excel Tables to Structured FM Tables

What we do is save the Excel files to "XML Spreadsheet" format, then we
have a structured application and a read/write rules document that
converts the XML into structured tables. It works very well, only a
little bit of clean up is required at the end.

Hope that helps,

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: Fei Min Lorente [mailto:FeiMin.Lorente at onsemi.com]
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Sent: Tue, 30 Nov 2010 09:37:46 -0500
Subject: Converting Excel Tables to Structured FM Tables

I'm using structured FrameMaker 7.2 on Windows XP SP3.

  I have about 30 small tables, each in separate files (okay, they're
  actually OLEs in a Word document) to convert to structured FrameMaker
  (using a custom DTD) today, and I was wondering what you would
recommend
  as the most efficient method using only the tools that I have at hand.
  I also have FrameScript (but haven't written any scripts) and FrameSLT
  Lite Version 2.0 beta. So far I have tried:

  *         Creating a blank table in FrameMaker and copying and pasting
  one cell at a time.

  *         Copying the whole table into FrameMaker as a tab-delimited
  block of text, then converting text to table. However, I don't get my
  table elements and have to change all of them.

  I'm thinking of copying all the tables into an unstructured FrameMaker
  file and running a conversion table on all of them to turn them into
  proper structured tables. Any other ideas?

  Fei Min

  -------------------------------------------------------
  Fei Min Lorente
  Senior Technical Communicator
  Medical Division
  ON Semiconductor
  feimin.lorente at onsemi.com <mailto:feimin.lorente at onsemi.com> 
  +1 519 884 9696 ext 2297 | office
  +1 519 831 4931 | mobile
  +1 519 884 0228 | fax
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