Import an updatable range of cells into publisher.

[DiZastor]

How do I specify a range of cells, eg (B2:H16), from an excel worksheet to be imported into publisher?

[Old Bruce]

You could use Data Merge and you'll have to play about with the range and offset options. There is no problem with selecting the  Columns B through H, it is the Rows that require the range and offset.

[DiZastor]

Thank you Bruce. I'm too much of a beginner in Affinity to sus this out. I have built an interactive calendar in Excel in which I can change the year or language to create a language specific month by month calendar with each month on a separate page and include country specific national and other important holidays. The goal is to use Affinity Publisher to build a photo calendar with a different photo for each month, followed by the month and have the whole calendar interact with the Excel file. I can build a dumb calendar in Affinity, but cannot get it to refresh from the Excel data. I find that even copying and pasting month by month from Excel to Affinity Publisher wrecks the formatting.  It would be really great to be able to pick up the data from 12 monthly 7 column x 14 row arrays while maintaining all Affinity formatting. I can see how to link an Excel file to do a merge, but it only seems to deal with a row of data at a time. The attached file shows an English and Portuguese version of May 2023 but these were ad hoc copy and pasted from the Excel file plus some cell by cell formatting adjustments.

       

May and Maio.afpub

[DiZastor]

Took a while but I think I've solved it. I created a new Excel sheet in my calendar workbook and made a row per month by sequentially looking up all the cells in each month. I then inserted the cells into a month template in Affinity Publisher and can now data merge different years and languages into Affinity Publisher. It's a bit long winded (84 columns by 12 rows), but it seems to work.  

Edited January 16, 2022 by DiZastor