Search and replace, contents from excel file

Question

Hi
I have the list in the excel file which needs to replace. The script should read the excel then replace to the opened InDesign documents.
The excel(*.xls) file has two columns, first column has old nos. and the second column has the new numbers to replace.
Ex:
Column 1               Column 2
(Search)               (Replace)
4257/2          =>               1/2
4257/3          =>               1/3
4257/4          =>               1/4
3257/2          =>               1/5
3257/3          =>               1/6
3257/4          =>               1/7
4457/4          =>               2/2
4457/5          =>               2/3
4457/6          =>               2/4
4457/7          =>               2/5
Thanks in Advance,
Thiru

Answer 1

@csm_phil:
this is a very radical method, because:
1. you don't limit your changeGREP() to a specific table column (possibly the searched texts are found in other strings around the document and changed as well!)
2. you are in trouble if a certain value you want to change exists more than one time (not likely, but who knows?) and you want to change it in diffrent values per instance. That will fail.
If we deal with only ONE column of ONE table, to address issue 1 I would ask the user to select the column of the table and instead of:
app.documents.item(0).changeGrep();
I would use:
app.selection[0].changeGrep();
I don't hope issue 2 will apply in this case.
@mr. pathi:
However, in the case of only one column of one table to change AND if the new excel file contains ALL entries in the exact order (both all old and all new values), you could change the contents of the column by copying from excel to InDesign. No script necessary. The formatting of the old cells will be retained.
You cannot do that by placing the new table to InDesign and copy/paste the new column to the old one, because the formatting of the copied column will be transferred as well (paste without formatting is not an option here).
Uwe