Assistance with Data Merge for product sell sheets

Last year I started creating product sell sheets for our sales team. The sell sheet is built containg these elements: A product photo, a data table displaying product numbers, descriptions etc.. Underneath the photo and table is a text box. I have created a lot of these sell sheets for a variety of product categories. The prices are updated fairly often, maybe once every month or two. I created all of these using excel and Illustrator. Other than photoshop, Adobe products were forign to me and never looked into what indesign was capable of until now.
I am wondering if the data merge feature would be a good fit for what I am doing. I would be more than happy to share my project files. I am asking for a little bit of hand holding here to expedite this process. Anyone out there willing to take a look and help me out??
Project Files:
PDF Sell Sheet created in Illustrator (would like to have the same look and feel but have the data automated in Indesign)
Excel Data (Looking to reformat the way the data is displayed so that it would work well with Data Merge)

I don' think data merge will lend itself well to that sort of layout. It's just not sophisticated enough. For datamerge, all the data for each module has to be in one row on your excel sheet. Example: The setup on top will yield the example below. The image has a placeholder in the far left.
For your example, I think your best bet is to set up table styles. (table styles won't hold column widths, but there is a script that you can use for that: it's referenced in this thread. If you make good use of paragraph styles and table styles, it will still go much more quickly in InDesign.
http://forums.adobe.com/message/4929669

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Strange Behavior with Data Merge (CS4) - Advice?

This is the most bizarre behavior and I may have to chalk it up to a full moon or something since I can't reproduce it and I cannot find any hints as why this happened. This is my last attempt at figuring a solution...maybe someone has experienced this??? Anyway, here's what happened...
I do a data merge for addressing envelopes. Been using the InDesign data merge feature for a couple of years now, no problems.
My address list is approximately 1200. It's in a .csv file with the following fields: fname, lname, company, address1, address2, city, state, zip
For my last mailing, approximately 300 addresses were merged wrong. Here's the crazy thing it did: instead of using the address1 field for the current record, it used the address1 field from the NEXT record, and ONLY the address1 field.
Here's more bizarre-ness. The NEXT record was merged correctly.
For example:
Record 1 (address1 should be 555 Cherry Lane, Apt 5)
John Smith
Smith Company
123 Main Street, Apt 5
Small Town, CA 12345
Record 2 (John Smith's address used THIS address1, but NOT address2 or any other field! Jane Doe's address is correct)
Jane Doe
Doe Company
123 Main Street, Suite 300
Big Town, TX 56789
I've tested. I've looked for commonality in the records, where it's placed, if there was something unusual about it's format. I come up empty. The incorrect data seem randomly interspersed.
One thing that I have to do is break up the actual merge. Either my computer memory or InDesign can't handle 1200 merge records. So, I merge approximately 200 records at a time (I make 6 print files). I don't know if this has anything to do with it (like I said, the incorrect data is interspersed all through out), but, thought I'd mention it.
Any advice is appreciated. I'm hesitant to use it again until I can understand why this happened.
thanks much,
Kia

CS was soemtimes flakey in this way with Data Merge.
Are you updated to the latest patch? Most issues were resolved at some point.
That said, I recall another user with this problem, and it never resolved with his particular file. I examined the data file and couldn't find any issues, but it behaved identically on my system tot he way it did on his so I can only conclude there was still some bug, or something about the data file that we were unable to detect. I seem to recall that the same data file merged correctly in CS3, but I don't recall if I saved it long enough to test in CS5. I've not had any issues with my own files in any version.
Open the file in a plain text editor and look for any odd characters (I'd start the search where the merge first fails). Also do a Save As from the text editor to make sure there is no possibility of formatting from your spread sheet having found its way in.

Importing CSV file with Data Merge Fails

Specs
See pasted text from CSV at http://pastebin.com/mymhugpN
I am using InDesign CS6 (8.0.1)
I created the CSV by downloading it from a Google Spreadsheet as a CSV. I confirm with the Terminal that the character encoding is utf-8 usnig the file command.
Problem detailed
I am trying to import a CSV file (utf-8) with Data Merge via the Select Data Source... command with Show Import Options checked. When viewing the Data Source Import Options dialog, I set the following options—Delimiter:Comma, Encoding:Unicode, Platform:Macintosh. I leave Preserve Spaces in Data Source unchecked. It fails to import any variables and produces no error message. I have tried other CSV files as well (created TextEdit, Espresso, etc.) and it seems that InDesign will not import any files if Unicode is specified as the encoding, no matter which other options are specified.
Can anyone else confirm this?
Importing as ACSII works, but obviously does not display my content correctly.

Mike is having some trouble posting in this thread (and I am too), but he sent me a PM with what he wanted to say:
OK. I think I might have a positive answer for you.
I was getting lost in the upper ASCII characters you showed. In your test file I never could see any--a case of not seeing the trees for the forest.
Your quote marks are getting dropped in your test file. Now, this may or may not affect other factors but it does in some further testing. I believe ID has an issue with dropping quote marks even in a plain ASCII file if the marks are at the beginning of a sentence and the file is tab delimited. Call it a bug.
Because of all the commas and quote marks in your simple file, I think you should be exporting from Google Docs' spreadsheet as a tab-delimited file. This exported file has to be opened in a text editor capable of saving it out as a UTF-16 BE (Big Endian) type of file.
Also, I think you are going to have to use proper quote marks throughout, or change them in the exported tab-delimited file. Best to have a correct source, though.
Here is your sample ZIPped up. I think it works properly. But then again, I think I might be bleary-eyed by now.
http://www.wenzloffandsons.com/temp/merge_psalms_utf-16.zip
Take care, Mike

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Hello all,
I am quite new to this, and i have a question...
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Try this:
Save your file as a UTF-16 BE (Big Endian) file.
Import showing options in ID. I'm on a PC, choose the below regardless.
Should look like this in ID.
Apologies to Farsi-speaking people everywhere. I pulled some text out of a Farsi text file to make up this tab-delimited merge file. I don't speak it, so it is likely servely non-sensical.
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Take care, Mike

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I don't know anything about scripting. I hope somebody can write one or provide me with a link to a solution.

I am trying to do the same thing.
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I now want to name PDF with one of my field names and create single named PDF files.
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Time for me to sound like a broken record. Data merge could be used for this but I don't think it was ever intended for such recurring publications like you are making. There will always be a lot of repetitive work that always will need to be performed after each update.
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Exception              CX_SY_OPEN_SQL_DB
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Safari Crashes - says it cannot find pages then finds it or retry. recd notice of crash once with data page for submission but send attempts were failed. slow page changes. norton finds nothing.

- says it cannot find pages then finds it or retry. recd notice of crash once with data page for submission but send attempts were failed. slow page changes. norton finds nothing.

I would suggest that you uninstall Norton.
Norton does nothing useful on a Mac.
Norton is know to cause damage to Macs.
Allan

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I've tried to change the CSV file to Unicode and change the language setting but it still don't work.
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Try this:
Save your file as a UTF-16 BE (Big Endian) file.
Import showing options in ID. I'm on a PC, choose the below regardless.
Should look like this in ID.
Apologies to Farsi-speaking people everywhere. I pulled some text out of a Farsi text file to make up this tab-delimited merge file. I don't speak it, so it is likely servely non-sensical.
The text editor being used here (first screen shot) is the OpenSource NotePad++. I am also not using the ME version of ID.
Take care, Mike

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I have, what I believe, would be a common question for people using Data Merge in InDesign for business cards.
I have multiple phone fields, with a small-caps letter to indicate what type (mobile, direct, fax, etc.), i.e.:
M <<Phone Mobile>>
D <<Phone Direct>>
If an employee has only one phone line, how can I make it so that the entire line will be omitted from the final merged doc?
In the past, I've just gone through the final set and quickly removed extra lines/characters, but I know there's a way!
Thanks.

You could also do a find/replace (or, rather two of them if needed) to remove the leading character.
So for your "D" phone number example, you would do a F/R after the merge like so:
D <FEFF>\r
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Mike

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You're asking a fairly simple utility to do things it's not designed to do. You should look toward third-party plug-ins for working with data in InDesign.

Can I use InDesign's Data Merge for more than just address labels?

I am a Graphic Designing working on a new science exhibition in Melbourne, Australia.
I'm trying to streamline the way we import our label content into InDesign (currently cut and paste from Word which is slow and leaves room for error). I've been going down the path of having a macro developed which converts the Word content into a csv file so I can then import this into InDesign through data merge, however the import is falling over.
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I have done what you are describing, with Word & InDesign, on a daily basis, for years. Word is not the best choice for this kind of workflow, of course, but if I had to choose between placing Word & doing a data merge with CSV, I'd be torn. Neither one is really the tool for the job. XML import would suit you better, but if you're already midstream in VBA development, there's no point in trying to describe why placing carefully styled RTFs and clearing overrides is better than writing VBA to clean up Word files and turn them into CSV.
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Data Merge for addresses, wont remove blank fields

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt. Today it worked for a file, came back to it late with nothing unchanged and it wasnt working...
Im working with addresses for data merge and everyhting works fine but with the fields (like Address 2, Address 3, etc...) that are unused, I have it set to "Remove blank lines for empty fields" in the options but it will not work. Why doesnt this seem to work?

It didn't work in CS2.
I was told that it was initially broken in CS3, but later fixed (I cannot confirm as I skipped that version).
It doesn't work in CS4.
So, apparently Adobe managed to break a feature that did work, but haven't fixed it again.
-mt

Assistance with Data Merge for product sell sheets

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