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.et...@gl-group.com] Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2010 9:01 AM To: Roger Shuttleworth; Fei Min Lorente Cc: framers@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.lore...@onsemi.com] To: framers@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.lore...@onsemi.com <mailto:feimin.lore...@onsemi.com> +1 519 884 9696 ext 2297 | office +1 519 831 4931 | mobile +1 519 884 0228 | fax http://www.onsemi.com <http://www.onsemi.com> ------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to framers as rshuttlewo...@avbasesystems.com. Send list messages to fram...@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/rshuttleworth%40avba sesystems.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info. _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to framers as gary.et...@advanticagroup.com. Send list messages to fram...@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/gary.etzel%40advanti cagroup.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info. GL Noble Denton is a global independent technical advisor to the oil & gas industry providing assurance, consulting, marine operations and project execution services. For more information visit our website at www.gl-nobledenton.com or GL Group at www.gl-group.com. * * * * GL Noble Denton is a trading name of Germanischer Lloyd Industrial Services USA Inc. This e-mail and any attachments are strictly confidential and intended for the addressee(s) only. The content may also contain legally privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately, by return of email, and then delete the e-mail and any attachments. You should not disclose, copy or take any action in reliance on this transmission. Please do not print this e-mail unless you really need to. ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to fram...@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.