Will pagemaker import Word/Excel files?

I'd appreciate any comments on the following confusing problem. I'm writing a short pamphlet of 64 pages. I asked a friend to lay out the pages in Adobe Pagemaker since I don't anything about Pagemaker myself. I anticipated writing the text in MS Word, creating some tables in MS Excel, and then copying them to Pagemaker for final layout. My friend is not a technical person but has a lot of experience with Pagemaker. She tells me that Pagemaker will not import the Excel tables, or at least that she doesn't know how to do it. I copy/pasted these tables to MS Word where Word tables were automatically created, but she says that Pagemaker won't read the Word file either.

So I am confused at several levels. First, I find it hard to believe that Pagemaker won't import text and/or data from Word or Excel. Can anyone verify that? or are we doing something wrong?

Secondly, if in fact it is difficult or unusual to copy text or data into Pagemaker, then how IS the text in Pagemaker created? Do you have to type it into Pagemaker itself, and/or create tables with Pagemaker? I don't want to have to learn Pagemaker to do this, but I am surprised that my friend doesn't do this routinely.

Thanks for any comments.

 

Roger at CCCC,
Not sure if this is exactly what your looking for but it might help.

I found this notation listed Under:
Other programs
Files from Word, Excel, PageMaker and PowerPoint need no conversion. In those cases, I work from original source file from the program, or convert them by myself.

http://www.havbrandt.com/Fileformat.htm