InDesign How-To: Automate This with Data Merge!
This 2006 article is taken from InDesign Magazine,” Issue 11.
Clients have no problem asking for the impossible, like 300 personalized invitations and name tags — to be printed tomorrow. Thanks to an overlooked InDesign feature called Data Merge, you can make the impossible possible.
Italy-based trainer, designer, and Adobe evangelist Rufus Deuchler is an InDesign whiz. In this step-by-step how-to, he explains how easy it can be to create one InDesign template and fill it with text (like those 300 names) from a .txt or .csv file. It’s like Microsoft Word mail merge, except you’ve got the benefit of InDesign’s excellent text-composition engine and graphic features.
The recipient of this invitation will never know it took you just seconds to generate:
To download the sample files for the project and follow along, click here.
To download the step-by-step tutorial, just click the link “Automate_InDesign.“
This article was last modified on August 17, 2022
This article was first published on July 12, 2006
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Great! Many thanks for help :)
Hey this article was really really effective!!! it really works very nice! and easy :D
i have save time!! a lot of hours :D
cheers from Monterrey Mexico ;)
Any tips on indesign locking up when exporting data merged docs. I have to break up records into chunks of 150. Then after 2 rounds like this. Completely shut down Indesign and reopen. Tried several different jobs, all very simple, 1 to 3 fields for data.
Help
Paul
I want to import images from an excel spreadsheet. I have typed the image path every way possible. Tried typing a path for several different images in different locations on my MacBook. I even called Apple to make sure I identified the correct path. I always end up with a message saying the path is not linked to an image. All my data imports exactly as intended just not images. I even labeled the image column starting with an apostrophe and @ symbol. Don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
I figured it out. You get the by dragging the product image from the data merge window onto your picture box.
That image box with the text tag in there? Is the text “<>” necessary?
This is just what I needed, when I needed it. Thanks so much.
Tanya
http://www.missdetails.com
The PDF link is correct, so perhaps your difficulty lies in your Web browser’s settings. Have you tried right-clicking on the link and choosing “Save Link As’?
Terri Stone
Editor in Chief, CreativePro.com
The tutorial pdf can’t download.