Exclude locked Excel cells in Studio

Hello everyone! 

I have a quarterly translation project that includes a couple of big Excel spreadsheets with multiple sheets where only certain parts of each sheet need to be translated. In the past, we have tried to prepare said file for translation by hiding full columns and rows that have non-translatable content before adding it to Studio (where we exclude in the project settings the hidden content). However, there are certain cases in which we are not able to hide a full column/row because at some point in said column/row there is a cell(s) that needs to be translated, and thus if we hide the full column/row it would not get translated.

There is another way to "block cells/content" in Excel and that is to "lock" certain cells/sheets. However, when we add these spreadsheets to Studio for them to be translated, we can't seem to find a way to customize the settings so that Studio will exclude "locked cells".

Is there any way to exclude these locked excel cells in Studio o is it just simply not an option? Is there another way to exclude certain cells that we've been missing? 

Thank you very much in advance for your help.

  • Hello  ,

    Perhaps the solution here is to use colour in the selected cells.

    In Studio, you have the option of excluding cells (or including cells) with a selected colour

    Trados Studio options dialog showing 'Context Processing' with options to skip cells having the selected color and to only include cells having the selected color.

    There is an excellent article by Emma Goldsmith which I think you will find useful.

    https://signsandsymptomsoftranslation.com/2019/05/15/excel-cells-in-studio/

    Oana Nagy | RWS Group

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    [edited by: Trados AI at 3:03 AM (GMT 0) on 29 Feb 2024]
  • Thank you very much, . 

    I've run a couple of tests with this idea, but it still doesn't seem to quite work the way we want it to. As some cells (not all of them, though), colored in the chosen shade, seem to still get extracted for translation.

    This is an awesome idea for a different project, but it wouldn't quite work in this case, as it would add an extra step to our process: we would have to manually change the chosen color again after translation so we could return the spreadsheet to its original format, a task that would be quite time-consuming for us and not very efficient in this particular case as we have many different sheets. 

    Do you know if there is another less "invasive" way to exclude certain cells?

    Thank you very much in advance. 

  • Hi ,

    I use this feature quite often to exclude columns in Excel and it has never failed. When I thought it did, it was actually that I had set a slightly different shade of the color.

    To set the original color back to the cells you can use the Format Painter Icon of the Format Painter tool in Trados Studio. tool and apply the formatting to the whole sheet at once:

    Screenshot of an Excel sheet with 'abc' in cell A3 and 'xyz' in cell B3, 'original' and 'target' tabs at the bottom.

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    [edited by: Trados AI at 3:03 AM (GMT 0) on 29 Feb 2024]
  • Hi

    Thank you very much for your answer! That's a wonderful trick. I hadn't thought of using the Format Painter tool on the whole sheet at once. It's quite helpful. 

    Regarding the exclusion of columns by shade, I think it may have had to do with the formating of certain cells on our test file. We'll keep trying it out as it seems that the general consensus among the Studio community is that it works pretty much all the time. 

    Thank you once again for your help.