How to Link New Spreadsheet Cells into Existing Document - (2024)

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In this video we're going to show how to add additional spreadsheet links into a proposal after you've generated the proposal. Normally spreadsheet linking is done during the assembly of the document then you can update your spreadsheet and have the cells that were linked auto update. But what if you've done that but after you've finished writing the proposal and finished it you have to add additional line items or spreadsheet links that may have been forgotten.

Or, for whatever reason you need to add additional information into the proposal in the form of linked spreadsheet links. So we're going to illustrate this with one of our catering examples. Now we've already generated the proposal and pretty much gotten it ready.

We'll open up the spreadsheet. This is the stock example and you can see this is our Cost Summary that is linked into the actual spreadsheet. Everything you see here you know as we click are actual linked cells from the spreadsheet.

If we actually updated the spreadsheet and saved it, it would auto update into the proposal. Now, for this example we've already finished this proposal almost gotten it ready but say the client needs to change the items in the line items. For this example what we're going to do is we're going to add additional line items into the spreadsheet.

How do we get the Cost Summary updated? You know one way is just to manually type in extra items here. That would work just fine or we can manually copy and paste each cell and do it through Word's and Excel's normal linking system. How we do that we just add a line break here.

We do a copy a single cell and then we do a paste option using a paste. That would put in a link to the spreadsheet but say if we have a whole bunch of line items or a bunch of spreadsheet cells, that could get kind of tedious. So we're going to show you how to use the Wizard's post processing tools to auto link in a bunch of cells in one shot.

I'll close our spreadsheet, close our document. Okay, so I've skipped ahead here a second. Now I've inserted into our spreadsheet three new line items with some prices and further down I've added two additional line items and prices here and recalculated new totals.

How do I get all of these new items into the document through the Wizard's normal linking system. Okay, so what I've done here is if you remember when I just showed you the previous finished Cost Summary. All I've done is I've typed in some text with the keyboard and these are tags, spreadsheet linking tags.

Now, because there's only one spreadsheet associated with this project I don't have to put the name of the spreadsheet into the tag. We'll show that in another video. Since there's only one spreadsheet the Wizard will know exactly which spreadsheet to link in which will be the Cost Summary Calculator here.

I need to add three new line items so our tag is R8 to 10. That's row eight to ten so you can see here row eight, nine and ten are the three I just added. Column one first column which is in the spreadsheet.

Our Wizard uses column numbers one through X and you'll just have to match those up to the letters in Excel A,B, C. For quantity rows 8 through 10 column three A, B, C that's eight through ten. That's three is three row eight through ten.

Column two these are prices the amount. The Wizard will expand the eight to ten into three new line items and it will link in those three into this area. It'll link in these three into this area and we'll link these three into this area.

Now for the Open Bar we added two new line items, so rows 68, 69 column one then column three, column two. So that's really all there is to it. All the other cells haven't changed.

You could add these tags anywhere in the document. So if you just wanted to put the total price up into the Cover Letter. We could just put an R 156 column two, we just put a tag up here and we'll link in the total up into the Cover Letter.

So you can put these spreadsheet links really anywhere in the document. So now we've got our proposal updated, we've got our new line items in the spreadsheets so we'll just close the spreadsheet. We'll close our FullProposal docx which is this Combined Proposal Document.

How do we get the Wizard to actually link up everything. Okay, now this is an Expert level tool not in the Novice Edition. We go to our Document Processing.

Our Combined Proposal Document (Full Proposal) is already highlighted. We click the Merge Data with Tags and this will merge all of the data tags, say first name, last name, addresses, phone numbers. Any tags that you got left in the document say if you didn't fill in the Company Data or Client Data screens and you want to do the linking at a later time.

This Merge Data Tags will do the spreadsheet linking and regular data tags all at once. All we have to do is click Process Documents and you'll always get this pop–up message. This is Word's message from Word, not from our Wizard.

We can just say Just kind of sit back and wait for it to process the document. Okay, now the process has been completed. Open our combined documents.

Click Yes, we'll just let it update. Normally you don't have to click yes. Okay, so now that we've got our document open we'll scroll back down to our Cost Summary and you can see all of the new items have been added into the word document.

You can do this as many times as you want you know that's the nice thing about this these post–processing tools is you can use them to make a lot of post–processing changes to your documents. So that is all there is to adding additional Excel spreadsheet links into an existing document during your editing process. There are other more complex variations you can do such as linking in whole new spreadsheets that are completely custom and we've got other videos that will cover more elaborate types of spreadsheet linking situations.

There's all there is to the basics of linking in new cells in from a spreadsheet into your document.