

Enter the distance between rows or columns, depending on the flow option you choose. Data flow indicates whether your records fill the page in rows or in columns. If you're merging images, activate the "Alert When Images Are Missing" check box so InDesign inserts a missing link alert where an unavailable image should appear.Įnter the size of your page margins and your desired data flow on the Multiple Record Layout tab of the Create Merged Document dialog box, if you plan to output multiple records per page. Turn on the check box for "Generate Overset Text Report With Document Creation" so InDesign creates a document that lists all the places in your merged output in which the addition of merge data forced your text to exceed the capacity of its frame. Set the "Records Per Document Page" drop-down menu to "Single Record" to start a fresh document page for each record, or to "Multiple Records" if you're building labels or other items that create multiple individual copies out of a single sheet of paper. When the Create Merged Document dialog box opens, designate which data records to merge - all, one or a range - and type in numbers to identify specific records. Open the Data Merge panel's flyout menu and choose "Create Merged Document" to combine your target InDesign layout file with your data source. Open the flyout menu at the top right corner of the Data Merge panel and choose "Update Data Source" to refresh the link to your data file. If you see errors in your data file, edit it and re-export or resave it.


Turn off the preview when you finish looking through it. Use the Data Merge panel's navigation arrows to click through the individual records as they'll appear.

Open the flyout menu at the top right corner of the Data Merge panel and choose "Preview," or click on the unlabeled Preview button at the bottom of the panel. Preview your merge before you combine its data with your layout. To add a visual within text, include an empty image frame in your text frame at the point at which the merged visual should appear, and drag the image field name onto the inline placeholder. Click in your InDesign text at a location at which you want to feature variable data, and either click on the name of the desired field in the Data Merge panel, or drag and drop the field name onto your layout. Open the InDesign "Window" menu and choose "Data Merge" to open the panel of the same name. Leave space for variable images in areas in which you want to display images drawn from the file paths in a data source. For example, add a thank-you or attention-getting headline in which you'll insert the first name of a person, or set up a block of body copy talking about the conditions on a city street to personalize with the document recipient's street name. In a CSV file, enclose any data field that contains commas or quotation marks inside double quotation marks so the punctuation won't be mistaken for field delimiters.Ĭreate your Adobe InDesign layout, and decide which text areas you want to customize with variable data drawn from your CSV or TXT file. If you create your data file manually in a text editor, separate the fields in each record with commas or tabs, depending on which file type you prefer, and separate records with carriage returns. Export your data in comma-delimited or tab-delimited format, using the CSV or TXT file type, respectively.
