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• • May 2, 2018 at 7:50 am #103485
    Paul Williams

    Participant

    After successfully setting up a data merge file within InDesign I had to revisit it to do some amends.

    I updated the CSV file and the relevant images – I then selected the ‘Update Source File’ option in the data merge menu.

    Then, when selecting the Update Content In Data Fields option it deletes all the pics and data in all but the first box.

    Can anyone shed any light on this dilemma?

    If it’s a bug then that renders the whole data merge option useless!

    (I am using CS6 and was updating the data in the new document created after you run the data merge option from the master set up file I created)

    Any help with this would be greatly appreciated :) :) :)

  • May 2, 2018 at 8:10 am #103486
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I don’t usually update the data… instead, if something changes, I just re-merge the whole thing. But if you want to update the merged version, you can… but I believe you need to have your data “tags” on the master page first (before the merge). Did you do that?
    I recorded a movie on this here: https://www.lynda.com/InDesign-tutorials/Using-master-pages-Data-Merge/143323/163267-4.html

    • May 2, 2018 at 8:20 am #103487
      Paul Williams

      Participant

      Hi David,

      I do have the tags on the master page as you said.

      The reason I didn’t want to create a new merged document was the because of the limited layout options.

      I made the merged one and then moved the boxes around on the page to where I wanted them – I assume I had to do this as didn’t think you could merge data into a pre-defined layout i.e just boxes around the edge of the page etc.

      :)

  • May 2, 2018 at 8:57 am #103488
    Paul Williams

    Participant

    …what I should have asked was..can you design your layout first before doing a data merge? :)

  • May 2, 2018 at 9:04 am #103489
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Well, you can design the layout any way you want if you’re doing a single-record-per-page layout. If you are doing a multiple record merge, then it will take all the objects and put them in a grid.

    I’m not sure why your Update is not working correctly. Perhaps it cannot find the links to the images? Or perhaps something “broke” the tags, so they’re not tagged to the data anymore. This should work okay normally, as I show in my Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning course.

  • May 2, 2018 at 9:13 am #103490
    Paul Williams

    Participant

    Thanks David,

    I will check the video out shortly to see if I can see what it is that’s causing the problem :)

  • July 12, 2018 at 5:13 am #104898
    Luisa Brockmann

    Member

    Hi!

    Did you menage to solve this? I have a similar issue.
    I can generate my merged document with the placeholders on the master page just fine, but when I update my data source only the first products in each page updates, nothing happens to the rest of the products, besides their placeholders losing the color brackets around them.

    I think this is happening because there’s only one set of information on my mater page, but it’s the only one generated when I merge de document.

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