Me again. One for the Excel experts, I think.

I have an Excel file, which I have to import into an InDesign table for making it look nice. I don't have MS Office, but do have Open Office 3. The file opens happily, I've done some tidying and saved. The file includes a column formatted for dd/mm/yy. When I import the file into InDesign, I get all kinds of options, and it creates a nice table for me to format. Except the date column is empty.

My question is are there any other formatting options I can use to convert the date formats to plain text (I've tried to change the column format to plain text, but it seemed to assume it was a calculation and coughed up some strange result).

Thank 'ee.

try concatenating ' with the date field, that should force it to be text

Okay. Good.

How do I do that, please?

You could try copying it and then "Paste as text", might be under Paste Special... plain text.

That didn't work in the spreadsheet, sadly. It just pasted the formatting back in.

Let me clarify - I've got 200 date fields that I just was to export as text. I don't want to have to manually add a ' character in each field first.

So, can I automate the addition of the character? Or can I force the formatting to be read properly? All I want is to dump the spreadsheet into InDesign and make it look pretty. Can it be this hard?

No pressure, but I've got a client waiting on a proof for this thing now.

Heather can you mail me the sheet?

Thank you - but I've solved it now. *phew*

I copied and pasted into a text document, which has imported to ID with no issues. Thank you for your offer, though. Much appreciated.

Did I mention how much I hate spreadsheets?

Cool as long as its resolved.