Data merge saved me lots of time when I had to create 219 cards for boardgame It was a kind of trivial pursuit-like game with multiple choice questions... The way I did it was: I created 2 answer fields (correct & wrong) exactly on top of eachother for each answer. The excel file had 8 columns: question, answer1_correct, answer1_wrong, answer2_correct, answer2_wrong, answer3_correct, answer3_wrong, explaination. When the first answer was correct, the good answer went in the answer1_correct column, answer1_wrong column stayed empty, the answer2_correct also stayed empty, answer2_wrong had the second (wrong) answer, and so on... I created an excel file with some examples and I explained how it worked and when I received the excel file, it was like magic. 219 cards generated in 1 click.
As an experienced graphic designer for print with 20 years in the industry, I agree with Illustrator for creating the logo & the pattern but whey on earth are you planning business cards 2up on a sheet? You then generate your final print pdf which also has the cards 2up. Any decent printers I use or work for want multi page pdf files so always use InDesign to design the business cards. That's what it's for. There is too many yound designers thinking that layout should be designed in Illustrator. Yes Illustrator has gained some of the properties of InDesign but a good designer (for print) should have worked in print or at least know how the print files should be sent.
Thank you for great video. I have a question: could I merge a set of hyperlinks specifically over a set of image icons with InDesign. I need to merge every unique hyperlink (page of specified garment) with its respective "buy online" icon (buy online) at every page of my garments catalog? expect a reply from you ASAP. Thank you.
Can you follow up on inserting JPGs? I have a project to print 150 School ID cards. Essentially what you show here but, I would also Like the Photos to Data Merge. Imaging the time savings. Doing 150 imports. Thanks Great series!
2:02 The bane of every Prepress Operator is designers who use Illustrator as a page layout programme. It isn't. Do your vector artwork in Illustrator. Get rid of unused colours in your colour palette. Unless your job is being printed with spot colours, convert all your colours to CMYK. Do your bitmapped graphics in Photoshop, then convert them to CMYK and save them as .tiff or .psd files. NOW assemble your artwork in InDesign and do all your typesetting in InDesign...NOT illustrator. Save it as a press-ready PDF and don't forget cropmarks and .125" of bleed. Better yet, ask your printshop for their colour settings and import them via Bridge into all your Creative Cloud apps.
Thank you very much Martin. Is there any file type which support Hungarian special letters? I'm in trubble with "á í ű ő ü ö ú ó é" letters. I have used CSV UTF-8
is there any way to step and repeat easily so that numbered form can be cut and stacked? For example, 10,000 letter-sized forms, numbered from 000001 to10000. I would want to generate a 17x11 file so that the forms can be printed 2 up on a sheet, then cut and stacked. You have a great playlist of videos, btw, so I just subbed to your channel.
Hey Martin as always another great tutorial, Kind Request for your next video tutorial Plz explain InDesign's FIND AND CHANGE Panel in Detail there are options TEXT, GLYPH,GREP,OBJECT Do explain all especially GREP One And all about GREP CODES or other resource's where will get to know how to use it exactly. Thanks..
I went with the artboard workflow in the previous video but whenever I am placing (Ctrl + D) the created designs in InDesign the template getting pixelated for some reason. What am I doing wrong?
Thank you, you save my life. I need to design a ticket with unique serial number and password. your video help! thank you so much. I pray for your health and well being and may you be granted with billions of dollar
Tom Ramzul glad this video was useful for you and thanks for the good wishes! I'm content with good health but I also don't mind the billions of dollars 😉🙌
Let's say we did a catalog with multiple products (let's say 6), Would we use "Merge multiple records" if we wanted to have all 6 product spots to be different?
Thank you!! I was trying to do this in Illustrator, but there you have to set actions and export each into its own PDF. This wasn't going to work for my 200 copy batch D: You've saved me hours of time and headaches!
I JUST WANT TO KNOW HOW CAN I BRING THE LAST WORD TO SECOND LINE WITH OUT REDUCING THE FONR FOR EXAMPLE NAME IS ROBERT DOWNY JUNIOR BUT ACCORDING TO MY TEXT BOX AND WIDTH ITS SHOWING LIKE ROBERT DOWNY JU- NIOR HOW CAN I CONVERT IT INTO ROBERT DOWNY JUNIOR WITH OUT REDUCING FONT IM FACING THIS ISSUE IN DATA MERGE
well, but is possible in InDesign activated "dinamic visibility" with objects than i show on and show off in differents works? illustrator make it possible but i dont find this option in indesign :(
Thank you, great explanation! Is it possible to do things with bulleted lists using data merge? Where some entries will have 3 bullets and others will have 4 or 5? Thanks!
perfect and clear explanation. But it doesn't work with - and it is really strange - slovak alphabet, french, danish etc. Data merge in Indesign does not recognize symbols as: ščťžýýáæøå... Maybe I am doing some mistake somwhere.
OK - this is the solution :) 1. save the data file as .csv in excel 2. take that excel doc and uploading it to google sheets (to remove all the junk excel puts in their .csv) 3. Redownload the file from google sheets. locate the file and (on windows) right click the file and hit "edit". 4. This opened the file in Notepad, hit "save as" and change the encoding to "Unicode" - or try to encoding anything else (UTF-8, UTF-16 and so on.....) 5. load the new text file in Data Merge
I’ve been on the fence about moving to InDesign. Still not sure.... can you use this feature if your document needs to pull in from 2 data sources? (Page 1-4 from one source, page 5&6 from another with totally different fields, then back to the first?)
With InDesign can you generate utility bills? The data will be in a .txt file. Can InDesign create a bar graph which shows usage based off the data in the .txt file?
EXCELLENT TUTORIAL! I have a question... I have a data file with 3000 records, will I end up with a 3000 page Indesign document or is there any other way around it? Please help! Thanks in advance! Love your tutorial and patient voice.
excellent tutorial! can you plz tell me how to data-merge with both sides of a page? how to print on both pages. like I want to print on an A4 page, multiple cards in same pages, and also i want to print the back part of the cards in the back part of page accordingly. so after cutting, I want to get cards that have things printed on both sides of the paper
Just wanted to let you know your video was so helpful. My and my boss tried to figure out what’s wrong with importing excel sheet file to indesign program to make name tags and your step by step tutorial was SO HELPFUL thank you so much!!!
Excellent video. How do you link 10-15 Excel/CSV files with different layouts (columns and rows) inside InDesign? It is a product price list, which gets updated frequently. Thanking you in advance.
Hi! Lovely video, you literally saved my live and time! I just wanted to ask if there is any to way to export all the pages as Indesign Files but also packaged? Like you do in Photoshop automations. Thanks!!!
Fabulous tutorial. Thank you. One question, I have some addresses that have an address 2 (or even an address 3 line) and others to not. How do you make those extra lines not show for those who don't have them?
Thanks for the video! You just saved me hours of cutting and pasting. 44 business cards with 6 lines of data each in 15 mins instead of hours! Worthy of a click on the subscribe button!!
Brother excellent video invoicing has never been easier i can literally transfer 100s of customer records on to a premade invoice template and not even have to do much
Thanks for the great tutorial! I just used it to create and print my Christmas Card Envelopes!, 120 beautifully done and ready for next year too! AWESOME!!
That will save a lot of work for sure! But im interesting in case of that there are some hyperlinks or files (such as icons) need to load instead of simple text. Thank you!
can you cover some of the other menus in the utilities? a lot of other people cover the more "fun" parts of indesign but i still feel like i dont know what a lot of menus are because theyre so utilitarian
Excellent tutorial! Thank you very much. We are having problems adding the comma in $15,000. We have tried "," but it doesn't work. Do you have any advice?
Hi Nick, You can try formatting the numbers/money as text or general and see if that will work. You may still need to use the ",", you can also try exporting the files as Tab-delimited instead of CSV
Data merge saved me lots of time when I had to create 219 cards for boardgame It was a kind of trivial pursuit-like game with multiple choice questions...
The way I did it was: I created 2 answer fields (correct & wrong) exactly on top of eachother for each answer.
The excel file had 8 columns: question, answer1_correct, answer1_wrong, answer2_correct, answer2_wrong, answer3_correct, answer3_wrong, explaination.
When the first answer was correct, the good answer went in the answer1_correct column, answer1_wrong column stayed empty, the answer2_correct also stayed empty, answer2_wrong had the second (wrong) answer, and so on...
I created an excel file with some examples and I explained how it worked and when I received the excel file, it was like magic. 219 cards generated in 1 click.
Bro, you saved 10 hours of my time every 2 months BIG BIG LIKE!
Love the RDR references lol, excellent tut my friend, BIG LIFESAVER.
First thing I noticed :D
hey, thank you for teaching this. i usually have a hard time learning, but your way really helped me. appreciate the help and the work you do
Thank you. This video was very useful!
As an experienced graphic designer for print with 20 years in the industry, I agree with Illustrator for creating the logo & the pattern but whey on earth are you planning business cards 2up on a sheet? You then generate your final print pdf which also has the cards 2up. Any decent printers I use or work for want multi page pdf files so always use InDesign to design the business cards. That's what it's for. There is too many yound designers thinking that layout should be designed in Illustrator. Yes Illustrator has gained some of the properties of InDesign but a good designer (for print) should have worked in print or at least know how the print files should be sent.
Thank you so much, that is a professional video with very useful informations! Exactly what I was looking for!
You are a life saver!!! Thank you so much for posting this tutorial!
Thank you for great video. I have a question: could I merge a set of hyperlinks specifically over a set of image icons with InDesign. I need to merge every unique hyperlink (page of specified garment) with its respective "buy online" icon (buy online) at every page of my garments
catalog?
expect a reply from you ASAP.
Thank you.
Question, would you be able to custom the export of the merge to individual PDFs with a unique naming convention using text from your source file?
Can you follow up on inserting JPGs? I have a project to print 150 School ID cards. Essentially what you show here but, I would also Like the Photos to Data Merge. Imaging the time savings. Doing 150 imports. Thanks Great series!
Indeed a brilliant feature in InDesign.... Thank you, Martin.... as usual, v. good tutorial
Excellent tutorial. Very clear and easy to follow, and professionally presented. Going to save me a LOT of time.
2:02 The bane of every Prepress Operator is designers who use Illustrator as a page layout programme. It isn't. Do your vector artwork in Illustrator. Get rid of unused colours in your colour palette. Unless your job is being printed with spot colours, convert all your colours to CMYK. Do your bitmapped graphics in Photoshop, then convert them to CMYK and save them as .tiff or .psd files. NOW assemble your artwork in InDesign and do all your typesetting in InDesign...NOT illustrator. Save it as a press-ready PDF and don't forget cropmarks and .125" of bleed. Better yet, ask your printshop for their colour settings and import them via Bridge into all your Creative Cloud apps.
Thank you very much Martin. Is there any file type which support Hungarian special letters? I'm in trubble with "á í ű ő ü ö ú ó é" letters. I have used CSV UTF-8
is there any way to step and repeat easily so that numbered form can be cut and stacked? For example, 10,000 letter-sized forms, numbered from 000001 to10000. I would want to generate a 17x11 file so that the forms can be printed 2 up on a sheet, then cut and stacked. You have a great playlist of videos, btw, so I just subbed to your channel.
Michah Bell the HR guy. OMG LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
Hey Martin as always another great tutorial,
Kind Request for your next video tutorial
Plz explain InDesign's FIND AND CHANGE Panel in Detail there are options TEXT, GLYPH,GREP,OBJECT Do explain all especially GREP One And all about GREP CODES or other resource's where will get to know how to use it exactly.
Thanks..
Red dead Redemption 2's characters' name is a nice detail
Loving the Red dead 2 references :)
Hey Martin, thanks for the good tutorials. Do you have any coupons for your Udemy courses? I need Indesign & Illustrator. Thx.
Good video. Thank you!
I went with the artboard workflow in the previous video but whenever I am placing (Ctrl + D) the created designs in InDesign the template getting pixelated for some reason. What am I doing wrong?
But why you put business cards with trims marks with strange size? Yes, you showed data merged, but this files are absolutely not ready to print .
Thank you, you save my life. I need to design a ticket with unique serial number and password. your video help! thank you so much. I pray for your health and well being and may you be granted with billions of dollar
Tom Ramzul glad this video was useful for you and thanks for the good wishes! I'm content with good health but I also don't mind the billions of dollars 😉🙌
Let's say we did a catalog with multiple products (let's say 6), Would we use "Merge multiple records" if we wanted to have all 6 product spots to be different?
Thank you!! I was trying to do this in Illustrator, but there you have to set actions and export each into its own PDF. This wasn't going to work for my 200 copy batch D: You've saved me hours of time and headaches!
Micah Bell as HR is a genius idea lol
I JUST WANT TO KNOW HOW CAN I BRING THE LAST WORD TO SECOND LINE WITH OUT REDUCING THE FONR
FOR EXAMPLE
NAME IS
ROBERT DOWNY JUNIOR
BUT ACCORDING TO MY TEXT BOX AND WIDTH
ITS SHOWING LIKE
ROBERT DOWNY JU-
NIOR
HOW CAN I CONVERT IT INTO
ROBERT DOWNY
JUNIOR
WITH OUT REDUCING FONT
IM FACING THIS ISSUE IN DATA MERGE
Very well explained. Thank you. (EDIT) I should mention, you have just saved my ass. Thanks, pal. All the best to you. Subscribed.
Glad I could help 🙌
Can't believe nobody mentioned the Names you used yet. Brilliant ;)
bruh.. you're using rdr2 character names lol
You sir have earned a sub, saved me so many hours filling in over 2000 nametags for my client
Thank you... very helpful!!
well, but is possible in InDesign activated "dinamic visibility" with objects than i show on and show off in differents works? illustrator make it possible but i dont find this option in indesign :(
Hi, I'm Nithin from India, Your tutorial is really excellent and useful, A big thanks for your effort and the video.
why my csv data can spread like this tutorial in 4:53 ?
my data merge show like this
I have the excel file which inclued images too, do i merg them directly by this feature
I’m glad I watched till the end because I learned about “update” data source! Wow. Wish I had known about that two days ago! 😭😭
What about populating an Avery Template using InDesign? 5371 has 10 slots
Incredible tutorial, wish you could explain till generating pdf.
Thank you, great explanation! Is it possible to do things with bulleted lists using data merge? Where some entries will have 3 bullets and others will have 4 or 5?
Thanks!
I would like to know this too. I think it's possible by adding entries and commas? And the bullet in the paragraph style
Have to try.
How to export every file alone?
Thank you.
thank you very much !!! how do i also add images i tried the @ symbol but it didn't word
perfect and clear explanation. But it doesn't work with - and it is really strange - slovak alphabet, french, danish etc. Data merge in Indesign does not recognize symbols as: ščťžýýáæøå... Maybe I am doing some mistake somwhere.
OK - this is the solution :)
1. save the data file as .csv in excel
2. take that excel doc and uploading it to google sheets (to remove all the junk excel puts in their .csv)
3. Redownload the file from google sheets. locate the file and (on windows) right click the file and hit "edit".
4. This opened the file in Notepad, hit "save as" and change the encoding to "Unicode" - or try to encoding anything else (UTF-8, UTF-16 and so on.....)
5. load the new text file in Data Merge
Is it possible to merge data directly from columns and rows in excel?
I’ve been on the fence about moving to InDesign. Still not sure.... can you use this feature if your document needs to pull in from 2 data sources? (Page 1-4 from one source, page 5&6 from another with totally different fields, then back to the first?)
Great video! Happy that you are a Red Dead |Redemption II fan.
With InDesign can you generate utility bills? The data will be in a .txt file. Can InDesign create a bar graph which shows usage based off the data in the .txt file?
Excellent tutorial. I did it and it seems easy to follow along
Woow this is awesome. i love your work and teachings
Is this available in older versions of Adobe Indesign?
Can I use data merge to change the width of a rectangle or the fill color of an object?
woah, paying for adobe cc does have its advantages
Brilliant video tutorial. It saved my sanity.
EXCELLENT TUTORIAL! I have a question... I have a data file with 3000 records, will I end up with a 3000 page Indesign document or is there any other way around it? Please help!
Thanks in advance!
Love your tutorial and patient voice.
Awesome. Thanks. You just save my time
Great tutorial, thank you :)
excellent tutorial!
can you plz tell me how to data-merge with both sides of a page?
how to print on both pages. like I want to print on an A4 page, multiple cards in same pages, and also i want to print the back part of the cards in the back part of page accordingly.
so after cutting, I want to get cards that have things printed on both sides of the paper
Thank you so much, I think I'll have to do this tomorrow at the office, so I could impress my colleague and say : yea of course I can do this ! Haha 😄
Just wanted to let you know your video was so helpful. My and my boss tried to figure out what’s wrong with importing excel sheet file to indesign program to make name tags and your step by step tutorial was SO HELPFUL thank you so much!!!
Excellent video. How do you link 10-15 Excel/CSV files with different layouts (columns and rows) inside InDesign? It is a product price list, which gets updated frequently. Thanking you in advance.
Hi! Lovely video, you literally saved my live and time! I just wanted to ask if there is any to way to export all the pages as Indesign Files but also packaged? Like you do in Photoshop automations. Thanks!!!
Fabulous tutorial. Thank you. One question, I have some addresses that have an address 2 (or even an address 3 line) and others to not. How do you make those extra
lines not show for those who don't have them?
Fabulous tutorial as always! Love your 'to the point' style! Thank you!
Thank you very much
it is same like MSoffice mail merge option... but here in INDESIGN... we can make more creative layouts...
Thanks for the video! You just saved me hours of cutting and pasting. 44 business cards with 6 lines of data each in 15 mins instead of hours! Worthy of a click on the subscribe button!!
Very clear instructions! Thank you for sharing!
Thanks for making this super helpful and easy to follow tutorial. Saved me soooo much time creating attendee badges for an event. :)
Thank you very much for the tutorial, it was clear and easy to follow. I have subscribed and awaiting more cool stuff.
Brother excellent video invoicing has never been easier i can literally transfer 100s of customer records on to a premade invoice template and not even have to do much
You saved my life!!! Thank you. 🙏🏻
got a like in the first 15 seconds as you used RDR2 references as sample names
Thanks! It saves me a lot of time.
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ i know this is saving me tomorrow. Much love. I’m subscribing too.
Namaste. This was really helpful. Have One Question, with the help of mail merge can I automate flyer too?
what if i need to do that to a document of many pages with much content and create 1k of documents different from each other?
As always your tutorials are coming in clutch -- saving my ass hours worth of work
Love your presentation, easy to follow. will like to see how you can serialize receipts(Numbers) with database clients
Excellent! listen, I have a plan
is it possible to use Chinese for the data merge? or a blend of English and Chinese?
Thanks for the great tutorial! I just used it to create and print my Christmas Card Envelopes!, 120 beautifully done and ready for next year too! AWESOME!!
This tutorial is very usefull Thank you so much!
I need to make a catalogue with multiple itens at the same page, do you have any tutorials about that?
Wish there was a 10X like button for this useful video.
Can I use a file as one of the data?
This is awesome! Can you also do a data merge in Avery label template?
wow really good stuff video
Wow i think this will very helpful for every designer.
Martin is an excellent teacher... sharing info & enhancing our knowledge... So why the hell would some people give a thumbs down???
very nice and clear video loved it
super helpfull, thanks!
Ne haragudj. Véletlenül nem vagy magyar? Annyira magyar az akcentusod.
De igen 😉
found the part 2. Thank you !
Thank you thank you!! This video was a life saver! I didn't know about the data merge feature. Appreciate it!
That will save a lot of work for sure! But im interesting in case of that there are some hyperlinks or files (such as icons) need to load instead of simple text.
Thank you!
Magic! Thank you.
can you cover some of the other menus in the utilities? a lot of other people cover the more "fun" parts of indesign but i still feel like i dont know what a lot of menus are because theyre so utilitarian
Excellent tutorial! Thank you very much. We are having problems adding the comma in $15,000. We have tried "," but it doesn't work. Do you have any advice?
Hi Nick, You can try formatting the numbers/money as text or general and see if that will work. You may still need to use the ",", you can also try exporting the files as Tab-delimited instead of CSV