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• • August 11, 2016 at 11:47 pm #87389
    Brandon Willis

    Member

    IF you’re anything like me, data placeholders make you screen. Fortunately, I think I found an easier way to remove bad placeholders.

    To give some background, I had a problem today where I updated a data merge document with new placeholders and removing old placeholders – or so I thought. After changing out the new fields, I came across the much dreaded “There is a least one data placeholder that cannot be found in the data source” error message. After going through my document multiple times by hand, I couldn’t find old/bad placeholder. While using story editor to find placeholders, I noticed that Data Merge placeholders were treated as hyperlinks in the story editor.

    This got me on the idea of checking the hyperlinks panel. Which I discovered lists all web hyperlinks in addition to all data merge placeholders. Most importantly this panel lists all Legal and Illegal data merge placeholders, meaning that you can find the rogue field and simply delete the hyperlink.

    The illegal placeholder ended up being on a hidden object on the pasteboard (shame on me).

    The document wasn’t too long but had just over a hundred placeholders in tables, in images, and in hidden elements. This made going through all of the text frames, tables, and so on extremely difficult. And while this “fix” isn’t perfect, it was a lot easier than going through tons of pages looking for one string of bad text.

    Tl;DR: If you can’t find the rogue/old/bad placeholder, check the hyperlinks panel since it lists all links in the document, not just placeholders.

  • August 12, 2016 at 6:50 am #87397
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Brandon: WOW. That’s brilliant! Thank you for sharing your discovery.

  • February 27, 2018 at 7:33 pm #102026
    Robert Sbisa

    Member

    I love this solution!(In concept – I have been unable to use it).

    I’m now using CC2018. Has anything changed?

    I have an old file that I update annually for a customer. Every year the new data file from the customer is slightly different. There are about 70 placeholder fields that I must check, one-by-one. When I try Brandon’s solution, checking hyperlinks, I do not see any “illegal fields”. All of the hyperlinks in the list have a red dot (“URL is not available”) but I can navigate to every placeholder by clicking the page number. There are no alerts (triangle + !). After painstakingly clicking every placeholder in the document, I found the only real fix is to delete every hyperlink and start over, clicking every placeholder and newly assigning a field from the new data file.

    What am I doing wrong or not getting?

  • May 1, 2018 at 8:24 am #103449
    Christophe Clarey

    Member

    Hello,

    I’ve just created an account to thank you, Brandon! You are a life saver! That’s very clever to use the Hyperlink panel to remove not assigned variable. Thank you!

  • May 1, 2018 at 9:41 am #103454
    Brandon Willis

    Member

    Hi Christophe, I’m glad this was useful!

  • May 10, 2018 at 3:13 pm #103639
    Helen Butler

    Member

    I had been looking for an easy solution to the placeholders problem for a long time. Found out about this exact solution a couple of weeks ago after extensive web searching over many months. Today, I saw this. I can attest that it really works and saves lots of time!

  • August 28, 2018 at 9:02 am #110134
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    This doesn’t seem to work. All links are ‘illegal’ and show up red, even in documents that merge just fine.

    Am I missing something?

  • December 3, 2018 at 8:42 am #111934
    Deanne Penny

    Participant

    Amazing… thank you… : )

  • May 20, 2019 at 7:10 pm #116611
    Mo Ali

    Member

    Made an account just to say thank you. I was pulling an all nighter and was too deep into the design and was too tired to think of recreating it. I spent over an hour tweaking the CSV until I decided to Google it. I am really happy I found this. Made my night. Thank you kind sir. God Bless you.

  • September 24, 2019 at 10:30 am #14324072
    Andrea Bradbury

    Member

    OMG Thank you so much! I thought I had this whole Data Merge thing down. Well today, I think I spent an hour and a half going back and forth from template to list and trying to figure out what was wrong. <<FIRST NAME>> was in the design and on my Master Page (using the << >> in the design). Usually I completely clean off the Masters before I create my templates and start the merge. But this time, I forgot to clean off those Masters.

    This Hyperlink trick worked because I realized I used placeholders in my design that look like merge code. And the Hyperlink pallette showed me that the errors weren’t on a page number, they were on a Master page. Thank you!

  • March 30, 2020 at 12:35 pm #1235655
    AaronA

    Participant

    Echoing others’ comments, this doesn’t work for me because ALL data merge hyperlinks appear as red.

  • October 4, 2020 at 4:02 pm #127272
    v_spektor@mail.ru

    Member

    Thank you, Brandon!
    AaronA, no matter that all data merge hyperlinks are red: you can move your mouse over the hyperlink names or click on them and read their names, so you can find the names that does not present in the data source. And delete that hyperlinks.

  • April 23, 2021 at 8:30 am #14338798
    Jason Hoppe

    Member

    Very helpful! Solved my bad import issues in no time.

  • August 14, 2021 at 7:15 am #14346160
    Krishna Rao G

    Member

    Thanks ..it was a great help ….

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