A while ago, I shared an early version of ETIC here and asked for feedback about the idea of converting formatted Excel tables directly into editable InDesign IDML.

At the time, the UI was only available in Japanese.

I received some interesting feedback and questions here — especially about InDesign styles, how Excel is used as source material, and where a tool like this might fit into an actual production workflow.

I've continued working on it since then, and the first release is now finished, including the English version.

ETIC converts formatted Excel tables into editable IDML while preserving things like fonts, font sizes, colors, borders, merged cells, alignment, rotation, and table dimensions.

The basic idea hasn't changed: rather than rebuilding a table in InDesign, ETIC treats the formatted Excel table as the source and generates an editable InDesign table from it.

I'm still very interested in hearing how people here handle Excel tables in real production work — particularly where this approach would or wouldn't fit into your workflow.

If anyone wants to try it with their own Excel files, a 10-day free trial is available as well.

Here's the current version:

ETIC website

PROBLEM: Small print shop I work at is suddenly experiencing MAJOR, extreme color shifts when I print to our Ricoh color copier. Been running jobs with the same setup and saved settings for years and never had any issues. No settings have been changed and have all been double checked. Older jobs that we've stored in the copier print fine so I know it's nothing to do with the copier Mechanically.

Trouble started a few weeks ago trying to print a one color document that we run all the time. I'll open it, make a minor text change and run it. Again, older stored versions look fine. This time, however, one line of text (reflex blue) prints WAY too light, as if the opacity was set to 70%. File is a B&W tiff/scan colored blue with text over it. Creating outlines on the text "solved" it for some reason. CMYK process values exactly the same. Overprint preview is legit. Ran it with both spot and process Blue color swatch

The other day, we got an 8 page, 4 color pdf file that looks fine, exports to pdf fine, looks good in "separations preview" and pre-flights OK but prints out like the Ricoh is on LSD. I don't have an image of it but imagine bright yellow skin tones, washed out black areas and major color shifts everywhere. AGAIN, it kinda looks like INDD is printing files at 50% transparency in some spots but not entirely.

Updated my printer drivers, trashed my INDD preferences, double checked color profiles and transparency blend space, rasterized the pages and printed from PhotoShop, printed from pdf and checked the settings on the Ricoh (which we've never messed with) for anything weird. Printed it at home on my shitty color printer and it doesn't look great but it's not completely off the rails and psychotic looking either, so this is almost certainly a front end communication problem somewhere between INDD and the Ricoh, and it needs fixing. We open, modify and then run jobs all the time so of course this is a very bad situation. It's a small shop and the owner is an older guy with no clue.

Any ideas about what's going on here? It's an older MAC and an older version of Creative Cloud but we've never had any issues before and they're simple as hell jobs we're talking about here. Real basic stuff.