The frame should be large enough to accommodate the largest element in the formatting you've chosen. To look for records that don't fit the frame you have created (like a long name you didn't anticipate). There are a couple of good reasons to do this: You can preview the data by checking Preview at the bottom of the palette, and then using the navigation buttons to move forward and back through the records. Add commas, spaces, returns, or any other formatting that you like (Figure 15-19). Notice that in our example, First Name comes before Last Name, a different order than in the source file. You can place the data fields in any order that you like. You can use any of InDesign's character, paragraph, or text frame attributes to format them, including paragraph and character styles. They become field placeholders, such as >.
Select one of the text frames you created, and drag the field names from the Data Merge palette to position them in your frame. The palette should be populated with the data-field names that are identical to the column heads in the source file.ĭrag data fields into the placeholder frames. Choose Select Data Source from the palette menu, and select the file described in step 1. Open the Data Merge palette (Window > Automation > Data Merge). Dragging a data field to the placeholder frame in the Data Merge dialog box. Also add any boilerplate material to the target document you want to appear with every record (in this case, we didn't need it for a mailing list).įigure 15-19. It fit in the upper-left grid square that we created in step 2. (There are some special instructions for working with graphics, which we describe in the next section.) We added a single frame for the first instance of the mailing label (Figure 15-19). Create placeholder frames for text and graphics by using the Type tool for type and the Rectangle Frame tool for graphics. The Create Guides dialog box can be used to create a page grid.Ĭreate text and graphic frame placeholders. (You could also place data-field placeholders on a master page, but we didn't choose to do that.)įigure 15-18. 25-inch gutter between columns, and clicked OK to add guides to our document page (Figure 15-18). We decided on a 2 x 7 array of labels, with a. Because we wanted to place multiple mailing labels on a page, we found it helpful to use the Layout > Create Guides feature to preview how many labels we wanted to place on a page. (Optional) Use guides to make a grid for multiple records on a page. Create a new InDesign document that will contain any boilerplate information and data-field placeholders. Data-source file for a mailing list.Ĭreate the target document.
We started with a Word file with tabs between the fields (Figure 15-17).įigure 15-17. Open your data-source file and save it, if necessary, into a tab- or comma-delimited format. Let's create a mailing list as a simple example of a data merge.Įxamine your data-source document. The merged document is the InDesign document that contains the boilerplate information, repeated as many times as it takes to accommodate each record selected from the data source. It may also contain other boilerplate informationfor example, the text in a merged letterthat remains the same in each iteration of the data merge. Here are two more bits of terminology: The InDesign document that contains data-field placeholders is called the target document. A record is the complete set of fields that extend across a row of the data: Each field is separated with a tab or comma character, and each record is ended with a return character. A field is a category of informationfor example, an address or a zip code. If you're not familiar with data sources, it's helpful to understand their language: A datasource file (which contains the structured information of a database or spreadsheet) is made up of fields and records. You can, of course, do a mail merge in Word, but in InDesign, you have access to all its typographic refinements. But you have a wide range of sources: Any data source that can create comma- or tab-delimited text is fair game (including Excel spreadsheets, database files, or Microsoft Word documents with tabbed text). The data for the personalization comes from the structured information in a database. InDesign also has its own unique approach to automation: It can create documents which have personalized, or variable, informationsuch as business cards, mailing labels, form letters, even simple catalogs.
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