Hello,

I'm hoping that you all might be able to help me. I'm trying to help solve an issue at my workplace. We are a publisher and we often receive Excel files from the authors we work with who would like the charts and graphs they've created to be included in their books. Our current workflow involves manually moving information from Excel to Adobe Illustrator where the files are sized and prepared for print. This is a time consuming and error ridden process. One of the big difficulties involves Calibri. As I'm sure many of you know, this font does not always travel well. If you copy the chart in Excel and paste it into Illustrator the type is turned into a series of random and unusable symbols. So here's the first thing I hope might be possible: running a script to change the font in multiple files simultaneously. I usually change the font to Arial. This is complicated by the fact that the current files we're working with produce a dialogue box when they're first opened "The workbook you opened contains automatic links to information in another workbook", so any automatic function would ideally be able to suppress this dialogue box or automatically select "Ignore Links".

I thought I had discovered a way to circumvent some of the work. What I would do was use automator to create versions of all the excel files as PDFs. Then I would use an application I have that will automatically outline the type in a series of PDFs. This would allow me to move the chart into illustrator without losing the appearance of the type. However, when I turn Excel files into PDFs the charts and graphs in the Excel files always get ruined. They get cut in half and placed on two separate pages of the PDF. Is there any way to stop this from happening? The fact that you can only open one PDF page at a time in Illustrator makes this nearly useless.

Anyways, thanks for taking the time to read my post. If you have any advice for solving my issues or where else I might ask for help I'd really appreciate it. For what it's worth, if there is someone that can definitely take on and solve my problem I would be willing to pay for the service.

Regards,
sreilly