Linking Excel to InDesign

Question

We are currently trying to "automate" a process at work, and I'm looking for a way to link an Excel Spreadsheet to InDesign (or any adobe product for that matter), but we need it in a unique way and I'm having a hard time finding answers on how or if it can be done.
The image above is a sample page of what we are needing. We have companies that come to us for estimates/quotes, and a separate excel spreadsheet file is created for each company. We need to tell InDesign (or whatever program) to link to a spreadsheet, and it automatically pulls cell C7 to fill in where indicated, C8 to fill in where indicated and so on. So, it's not like a mail merge or linking one Excel file that we want to update when the excel file is updated. We have very specific information that we need in certain places. Any suggestions of how we can go about automating this process somehow using the Adobe Suite?

Answer 1

I'm sorry if my initial answer was terse and seemed counter to your specfication of "it's not like a mail merge."
I still think Data Merge is your best bet, with a merge of a single record.
You have to structure your spreadsheet such that all the fields are in the same row (perhaps you'll need to make a new sheet in the same workbook). But that should not be a problem. Then you export that sheet to CSV/TSV.
Next, you can set up Data Merge against one file, and as long as the field names field names are the same, you can change the Data Source and you'll get the new data. In what way is that solution troublesome? Yes, you have to Save As in Excel and InDesign does not "autoupdate," but it does't look like the latter is functionality you need anyhow.
There is also an XML-based solution. You can tag the text frames with XML tags, and then you can save from Excel to Excel XML. Then you can use an XML translation tool (e.g. XSLT) to convert the spreadsheet XML into an XML formatted for InDesign, with the relevant fields tagged with the same tags you used in InDesign. Then you can import the XML and the data will be inserted into the fields.
Thirdly, there is the pure scripting solution. A script that places the Excel file in InDesign as a table (because that's the only portable way to read data from an Excel file in InDesign; though under Windows you can use VBA to talk to Excel and read the data, and I suppose you could do something with Applescript as well but it would be less clean), then reads selected cells out of the table and puts them in various text frames that are tagged with script labels indicating they get data from various cells. This is more development work and could conceivably yield a smoother workflow, but it doesn't seem worth the bother over the Data Merge solution.
I guess the fourth solution is a plugin. I'm not aware of a plugin that deals with this particular problem, but just like it is the degenerate case of a data merge, it's probably also the degenerate case of a catalog such that a cataloging plugin like EmData or Smart Catalog might help you out. But it seems like waaaay overkill and this stuff does cost 3 figures (and up).