Link text fields in Designer 10 with cells in Excel or Word (table)?

[Mark56]

Sorry Guys, I did not get to this until now.

Mike, the posting on 29 July 2015, 09:02 PM, is almost exactly what the request is. But if Understand you correctly you made a PDF of this and then imported only the specified fields into the Xara file as a separate layer, is that correct? I have not imported anything like that into Xara before, I would need to find some documentation to try it.

- Last week
- This week

The spaces are not really named they are numbered but the numbers change week to week and sometimes on rare occasions, change over night. Have tried to attach an example of one week to the next so you can see what I have tried to do manually in Xara along but this would just be way to time consuming to do it like this. Hope this helps.


Mark

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi Mark, I'm intrigued, are all the bays the same size or do they also change size week on week?

[mikeymopar]

Mike, the posting on 29 July 2015, 09:02 PM, is almost exactly what the request is. But if Understand you correctly you made a PDF of this and then imported only the specified fields into the Xara file as a separate layer, is that correct? I have not imported anything like that into Xara before, I would need to find some documentation to try it.

hey Mark -
i fall short in the video department (and sorry, the video quality and size had to be reduced to fit the <5MB forum restriction...c'mon egg, let me have it ) but this is all i've really done - quick and easy and absolutely nothing fancy but it's all a couple of my intercom customers require. they want images changed seasonally when they give me an updated list of names to program into the units which is why i've used xara coupled with the excel file they give me.

the trick is getting the cells the right size to use as your template (or changing your image a little to fit the data). save the selected area as a pdf. then drag it into your xara workspace. i didn't do it but it's probably a good idea to group the imported pdf before clicking off it since it imports sometimes as oddly grouped cells.

[Mark56]

Egg,

I was kind of intrigued when the boss approached me with this as well. He has been trying to do something in Excel but has not been able to get anything he likes.
Yes the spots are all consistent for now and do not see any changes in the actual number of spaces for the foreseeable future.

Mike,

I think you did an excellent job with the video example. I think I can try and see where this might work. I have the spaces all put in the base layers of the current drawing example. Will make a copy and try putting the Excel file together to see what I can come up with.

When you say 'getting the cells the right size' are you referring to the Excel cells or the ones drawn in Xara? The point values on the hard coded Xara file is about a Arial 5 pt.

Thank you all for trying to help me in this new endeavor. Not sure if I'll get a chance to work on this over the weekend but will try and get something done. Will report back when I get some progress.


Mark

[Egg Bramhill]

Yes the spots are all consistent for now and do not see any changes in the actual number of spaces for the foreseeable future.

Hi Mark, I asked as some bays appear larger & smaller on your supplied images.

[pauland]

some bays appear larger & smaller

It made me wonder if some bays are for disabled people and some for motorbikes.

[Egg Bramhill]

Could be Paul, but I'm not even sure it's a parking lot, I think this was an example. However if Mark is going to link up a map to a spreadsheet obviously he'll need to bend the map to suit. Rather like the London Underground map is a schematic of the truth not the actual geographical map.

[pauland]

Here's a radical solution.

Just use excel. Colour the cell backgrounds appropriately. You can arrange the cells to logically reflect the allocation, if not the precise layout.

You can either not use Xara at all, or just load the excel as has been discussed.

A car park allocation diagram doesn't have to precisely mimic the physical layout, as Egg has mentioned.