I have been tasked with making Bingo cards for an icebreaker event at our company’s holiday party. Each employee will provide a fact about themselves, those facts will be randomly placed in one bingo card square and each attendee is supposed to “interview” other people at the party to find which facts are related to each person. I need to create about 30 unique cards utilizing about 25 different facts. We are currently gathering the facts from each employee, so I don’t have that information yet.
There are lots of on-line bingo card generators, but the cards they create a pretty awful. After a bunch of investigation, I was able to find a site that will create bingo cards and output them to an MS Word document. I used that site to create 30 unique bingo cards, using the numbers 1-25, which I then transformed into strings of text formatted as follows: numeral, tab, numeral, tab, numeral, tab, numeral, end paragraph.
I was hoping to create the cards in InDesign, using the data merge functionality. My data source file would use the individual numbers as fields, with a single corresponding fact as the related record. Is there any way that I can place the randomly generated numbers into tables in InDesign, and then somehow automate (through GREP, or some other funky trick that I don’t know about) changing the plain numbers into the affiliated data field identifier? Basically, if my InDesign table has a row with the numbers 12, 20, 18, 24, I would like to be able to change the information in each cell to field code 12, field code 20, field code 18 and field code 24.
Any ideas? Or any suggestions about a different way to create these cards?
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