Tables can be tricky: for example, what do you do if you only have to translate a little bit from a huge Excel table? Well, nothing. Let memoQ do the job.
Are you familiar with the problem of annoyingly large Excel files where the translatables are uncomfortably located only in a section of the rows or columns? This happens quite often: you have to translate only a subsection of an Excel file and not the whole thing. Let’s say, that in the file below you want to translate cells 5 to 15 in Column D and 5 to the end in Column E.
I have seen translators come up with very creative ways of dealing with this. A few days ago I talked to someone who suggested just hiding the columns which do not need translating. Others have suggested copying the cells to be translated into another Excel file or a Word document – they would then only translate that new document.
Well, we have a much better idea. Why not simply let memoQ do the hard work for you? Here’s how you make it happen – in less than just a minute.
Select Import with Options in Translations tab if you have the project already set up. If you are creating a new project, you will find this option in the New memoQ project window when you reach the Translation documents step.
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After you have selected the file, the Import with Options dialog appears. Select Change filter and configuration.
The Document import settings window opens. Click Select ranges in Excel.
This will open your file in Excel and a dialog box with three buttons, Add ranges, Add all and Finish.
Select the first range you want to include in the Excel sheet and click the Add ranges button. Do this for any other ranges you want to add. When you have completed this, click Finish.
The Excel file will now close and in the Exclude or include ranges window of the Document import setting window you will see the ranges you highlighted in the Excel file:
As you can see above, you still have two options: if the original Excel file contained only a few sections you needed NOT to translate, you could select only those and then click Do not import these ranges – this way the rest of the file will be imported and only those you selected will be omitted. In our case we want to only translate the highlighted sections, so we chose the other option, Import only these ranges.
Click OK and you can now translate only the sections of the Excel file you were asked to translate. After you finished your work and you export the document, all the segments you translated will be neatly included in the resulting (translated) Excel file.
All in all: no need to get too creative when you have memoQ to watch your back.
