Catalog & Excel formatting

[Andrew Brown]

I am using Excel as a data source for a catalog. One of the price fields in Excel is a 'currency' format and is the result of a formula. Publisher imports the field but only displays the figure as 45 instead of £45.00. Anyone know of a solution to this problem ? I can get around it by re-formatting the field as a 'number' format but as most catalogs will involve lists of products with prices I think the 'currency' format should work.

Thanks.

 

[°°°MS°Publisher°°°]

The best thing to do is do a SAVE AS in CSV (Comma Separated Values) and add
a £ to the figures and then copy and paste the values of the result only,
and then use that as your Merge information.

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[Ed Bennett]

After managing to set up OE-QuoteFix on his new PC, Ed reads a message

That hardly automates catalog updating does it ? I thought the whole
point was to be able to maintain products & prices in Excel and use
Publisher to print the catalog.

No, the idea is that you have an existing stock inventory and use Publisher
to create the catalogue from it.
Mail and Catalog Merge were at no point designed to update automatically
based on linked changes, AFAIK

 

[°°°MS°Publisher°°°]

Ed while what you say may be true, the formatting has never ever been fixed
in the Merge in Publisher and should have been.

Hence why I have always said the Merge in Publisher is crude and basic.

Sure Publisher 2003 substantially improved the layout and ability of the
Merge, but they failed to attend to the basics.

I am sure you could include the £ sign somehow automatically in Access. I
don't use the dog of a product that Access is and use Filemaker which easily
allows you to add a £ sign on the export process to the defined fields.

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[Andrew Brown]

No, the idea is that you have an existing stock inventory and use Publishe

to create the catalogue from it
Mail and Catalog Merge were at no point designed to update automaticall
based on linked changes, AFAI

However....each time you load the catalog it will read the current values from whatever spreadsheet you used as your data source. Anyway I was not talking about linking I was talking about the fact that Publisher does not recognise Excel formatting, which I think is pretty poor. If you import a cell that is formatted to a currency Publisher ignores the curency symbol AND the trailing zeroes.....