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

See more videos and subscribe to the Proposal Kit YouTube channel

In this video we're going to illustrate a more complex situation of having to link in a new spreadsheet into an existing proposal that's already been written. In a previous video we showed a basic situation where you'd just be adding new cells when there's only a single spreadsheet in a document project. In this example we're going to show how to add a whole new page into a proposal where there's already an existing spreadsheet but we're going to link in cells from a completely new custom spreadsheet.

It's not much more complex but it does take a couple more extra steps. We're going to illustrate this with our janitorial example. What we've got here is a completely written proposal.

We've filled this out ready to go and there's a basic Cost Summary and this is linked into the existing spreadsheet, the CostSummaryCalculator xlsx. Let's say we've finished this proposal and for whatever reason say the client needs a lot more detail in the proposal and it's complex enough where we probably want to do it up in a spreadsheet because of the all the calculations involved. What we're going to do is add a whole new page into this existing proposal.

How we do that is we can just go into the document project and edit the selected project. Go to the Pick Documents screen and we're going to add the Services Provided page and we'll move it up above the Cost Summary. Save our project, and you'll see the extra pop–up messages that the Wizard is going to be updating an existing project.

One of the things the Wizard can do is it can add in new pages into an existing document, so we're just going to add in the Services Provided page and that's going to give us a page where we can drop in a whole new table that will be linked into a whole new spreadsheet. We already have a stock spreadsheet in the project folder. We've created a whole new custom spreadsheet, this is not a spreadsheet that's part of the Proposal Kit system, it's completely custom.

Okay, so here's our updated proposal where you can see it's added in our stock Services Provided page. This is going to be a place where we want to put in a custom table for the spreadsheet. I've already written up a separate document with a custom table.

I'll just copy and paste this in here. Okay, so now we've customized the existing proposal by adding a new page for the services and I've dropped in a custom table. This table just has text tags, it's just typed by your keyboard for the spreadsheet linking that we're going to do.

The name of the spreadsheet Square Footage XLSX. This is because we have two spreadsheets in the project, we have to tell the Wizard what spreadsheet to link in. So in the spreadsheet linking tags we use XLS: SquareFootage, that's the file name of the spreadsheet.

We just don't put in the the file extension xlsx. We don't put that into the tag. Colon and then row number and column number.

You can see we want the area this is square footage row three column one, that's going to be the area First Floor. Footage in this cell row three column two. So, ten thousand is going to go in here.

Then the tasks, this is a range. Now we only need rows five, six, seven, eight and nine. So 5–9 column one so this will get expanded into all five of these columns.

Basically the spreadsheet linking tags you're just telling it what spreadsheet gets linked in, what rows, what columns. Either a single cell or a range of rows for a specific column and we just put all these into this table. You can customize this table however you want.

We have the project schedule over here. There's an area of a whole bunch of cells set up for the project schedule. So rows five, six and seven, columns seven eight and nine.

That's G, H and I will all get linked in here. So we can close our custom spreadsheet. I'll save our customized proposal.

I know these are spreadsheet linking tags they're all getting linked in from the Cost Summary Calculator. Close that. So how we get the Wizard to link up this brand new spreadsheet into an existing proposal.

We'll just go to the Merge Data with Tags post–processing tool (Document Processing). This is an Expert level feature as well because it's spreadsheet linking. We just click Process Documents sit back and wait for it to link up the document.

All right, this document has been processed. Click over to my project documents screen. Now we scroll down to our newly added Services page and you can see all of these cells are now linked in from the spreadsheet.

This doesn't even need to have any custom text editing done at this point. You could have linked in additional cells that aren't used and then just remove those however if you need. So this illustrates how to link in a whole new spreadsheet into an existing document using the Wizard's features to add a new page into an existing document and then do the document post processing to link in a custom spreadsheet.