Data Merge FYI - can't name a field "table"

I spent an hour today trying to figure out why my wedding place card data merge wouldn't work. I wasn't even getting an error message so it was hard to identify the problem. It turns out that you can't have a field named "table". Just thought I'd get the word out there as there seems to be no mention of it in InDesign Help.

Yeah, I resaved the source both ways, and even copied/pasted it into a brand new TextEdit file. Maybe the OS has something to do with it; I'm running Mac OS X 10.5.8. Just now, I opened a new TextEdit file and typed up a new one-field, one-record source file, and sure enough, it didn't work. But when I deleted the "e" in "table" and resaved it, it worked just fine.

Similar Messages

Data Merge Where Same Last Name Swaps Other Fields

I'm working on a data merge document of several thousand records (too many to efficiently rename anything by hand). In a record of employees, anyone who has the same last name as someone else gets their departments randomly scrambled among others with the same last name. So if there are two employees with the same last name, their departments are switched. If there are more, they are scrambled.
I have 6 fields: First name, Last name, Box number, Phone extension, Department, and Job title. The only field that I am seeing problems with is Department.
I have no idea why this is happened. It looks like it's all in InDesign. I really don't want to change these all by hand.
The excel spreadsheet is accurate and has all the information arranged correctly.
Any ideas?

RawrArt wrote:
I'm working on a data merge document of several thousand records (too many to efficiently rename anything by hand). In a record of employees, anyone who has the same last name as someone else gets their departments randomly scrambled among others with the same last name. So if there are two employees with the same last name, their departments are switched. If there are more, they are scrambled.
I have 6 fields: First name, Last name, Box number, Phone extension, Department, and Job title. The only field that I am seeing problems with is Department.
I have no idea why this is happened. It looks like it's all in InDesign. I really don't want to change these all by hand.
The excel spreadsheet is accurate and has all the information arranged correctly.
Any ideas?
I can't guess why this happens; perhaps others on the forum know with some certainty.
However, one workaround might be to create a unique identifier for each employee in a new column in the spreadsheet. After sorting the records as you like, use an Excel formula or Fill command to insert a sequential number for each row, in the new column's cell. Include the unique field in the merge in a tiny text frame, with white text color, or non-printing property.
HTH
Regards,
Peter
Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices

InDesign data merge isn't pulling in all fields, seems to be confusing some fields

Hi there - I'm trying to do a data merge in CS6 for about 450 address labels. The labels are 10-up so I made a .csv file with 10 equal sets of colums (named Firstname1, Firstname2, Firstname3, etc.) and merged those into my label document. I've done this before plenty of times with no problem, but for some reason this time the merge seems to be getting thrown off by something. I can see multiple places in which the merge will stop after a certain field - usually the address - then there will be a bunch of blank labels, then on the next page the address from the last label will start up again. I've attached a screen shot of what it looks like when the address breaks like this. In the top image, Troy Christian's merge breaks after the street again. Then a few blank labels follow, then Troy's city, state, and zip appear at the beginning of the next page. Then it continues on with the next address block (inserting commas along the way for some reason), then it breaks again.
I've scoured both the merge fields and the Excel file - nothing seems out of the ordinary - resaved the Excel over and over as both .csv's and .txt's, and can't get it to fix. Any ideas here?? Please let me know if there's any further info I can provide.
Thank you!

We didn't end up even looking at it in a text editor, although that probably would have been easier - we just saw where the errors were occurring in the merge and looked carefully at those cells in the .csv file, and then deleted line breaks, commas, and weird characters. Worked like a dream.
Thank you so much for your help on this!
e

Data Merge: Layout Adjusting to Varying # of Fields?

Greetings all,
A friend is producing a PDF report for different countries to show what diseases exist in each country. I think a data merge might work, but she will want to list information only about diseases that are present in a given country. Right now, there are blank / null cells in the spreadsheet for non-applicable diseases. Essentially, we’d like to collapse the display of any missing data fields (and its accompanying table) so that only relevant data is shown. So if we had three diseases total (A, B, C) and only two were present in a country (A & C), we’d like to produce:
Table. Disease A
Info, data in table
Table. Disease C
Info, data in table
Is this possible using InDesign’s data merge (or another feature)? Perhaps using content placement options? Any other ideas? I think the goal is to have different tables for each disease, though I’m not sure if that will affect the process. Many thanks in advance for the help; my InDesign experience is very limited!
Sincerely,
Eric

Awesome, thanks Eugene! I'll do some reading on table looks and styles. It sounds like we may be able to suppress tables if all their fields are left blank (or something similar)? If another question comes up, I'll post a mock-up of the final product.
Many thanks for the prompt reply.
Eric

Can you "name" a field in FormsCentral?

In Adobe Acrobat forms, I could name a field. For example, I have the same 4 questions for several presenters, so I name them "Q1Session1, Q1Session2", etc. I have not been able to find this feature in Forms Central.

Just label the fields as normal. You can go into the response tab and change the headers (on top) to be whatever you want (you can make them more unique). Those are used when you export to Excel.
I think that will solve your problem.
Randy

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

Data Merge-how can I get underlines to carry over?

In my database file (excel converted to text for import), I have a lot of items that have underlines. Of course when converting to txt, the underlines dont carry over. Is there some way around this other than manually re-adding the underlines after I do the completed merge? This is a LOT of underlines!

As promised, a simple script. Select the entire column -- vertically -- with the original single words, and run the script. It will search-and-replace this word in the cell next door with Underline On. If there seems to be a problem, the offensive word and its row number are saved, and displayed after the script has ended, so you can check if everything went as planned. Possible problems it catches are: the word does not occur at all in the next cell, or it appears more than once (in the latter case, all occurrences are replaced, though).
Copy, paste into a plain text editor (Notepad or Textedit in plain text mode; or, safest option, Adobe's own ESTK Editor). Save into your User Scripts folder as, ehm, make up a good descriptive name will you? Just make sure to end it with .jsx
//DESCRIPTION: Select a column of cells, then run to underline each of these words in the next column
// A No Guarantees Production
// Jongware, 4-Jun-2010
if (app.selection.length == 0 || !(app.selection[0] instanceof Cell))
     alert ("No cells selected!");
     exit(0);
cells = app.selection[0].cells;
app.findTextPreferences = null;
app.changeTextPreferences = null;
app.changeTextPreferences.underline = true;
app.findChangeTextOptions.caseSensitive = false;
app.findChangeTextOptions.wholeWord = true;
results = [];
for (c=0; c<cells.length; c++)
     if (cells[c].contents.length)
          app.findTextPreferences.findWhat = cells[c].contents;
          if (cells[0].parent.cells.nextItem(cells[c]).changeText().length != 1)
               results.push (cells[c].contents+" (row "+cells[c].parentRow.index+")");
if (results.length)
     alert ("Dubious result for: "+results.join ("; "));

Linking Data Merge Field with JavaScript for PDF link

Hello everyone,
I am using the data merge in InDesign to generate a PDF with data from a data source file. The data merge will populate a Product Number field. I want to write a script that will modify the Product Number field to contain a JavaScript Link in the resulting PDF.
For example, the product number [1234-567] will launch: app.launchURL("plsddr://localhost/1234-567|*", true); when the Product Number link is clicked on in the resulting PDF.
Can anyone provide an example on how this could be done, or point me in the right direction? If there is a better way to go about this, please let me know.
Thanks!

What findText returns is a list of Text, but that's totally interchangeable with Word. It appears InDesign can switch at will between Characters, Words, Lines, Paragraphs, and Stories.
Text can consist of one single SpecialCharacter (a column break, or a hard return, or any of the SpecialCharacters enumeration), or of a standard JavaScript "String" object -- a simple Unicode string.
The property that 'holds' the text is "contents" -- so, adding all of this up, to 'get' the text that has been found, you'd typically use
next = list.pop();
alert ("The text contents of this one is '"+next.contents+"'");
and you can build further on that -- using it as a HyperlinkDestination URL, or something like that. The Text item -- 'next' -- still points to the 'live' text it was found at, so be careful not to modify it. Doing something like
next.contents = 'hey what happened';
will change the actual text in your document. But it's also useful to add, for example, a hyperlink to the actual position this text was found on.
(A tip regarding changes: if you are to change your document, the original items findText pointed to will be messed up after you changed the first one! To prevent that, work backwards from the last item found to the first. findText(true) will reverse the order of found items, from last to first -- see the JS Help on that.)
As for
(Also, how do you print the contents of a Word object?)
that depends on what you mean with 'print' . To a printer?

Multiple Data Merge - Problem Resolve... Sort Of

I've researched this issue all morning and found issues dating back to 2012 regarding the problems with Indesign's Multiple Record Data Merge. Many of the issues are answered with the basic set up. Create a new page as a single page and non facing page document. It appears that an earlier bug was resolved that caused data merge documents to be placed off center when produced. The issue that I was experiencing was similar to what I had seen but not covered or not answered when it appeared someone was posting a question about it.
I started with a single page document, non-facing page, no initial text box, and sized to 8.5'' x 11''. I'm layout out name badges 10-up on a page. I had a previous template that had some graphics in the background for alignment purposes. I created a blank master page and a record holder for the name badge then loaded my data source, placed my data entries, and styled accordingly. Upon creating a data merge I selected Multiple Record and then previewed the data merge and positioned the elements on the page using the data merge controls top, left and column placement commands.
The preview looked perfect. The problem came when I finished the final data merge. The resulting page was not correct and looked nothing like the preview. Records were strewn about the page and excessive amounts of pages were created. I spent 4 hours trouble shooting this, far more than this project was billed. At this point it was a mission. In a reply dated back around 2013 I found that someone had removed a layer from their document. I had no layers. The only thing that was not a part of the actual data merge was the graphics that I had on the page for positioning that were not tied to the data merge at all.
I decided to delete these graphics and try to apply the data merge again. The results were perfect. I'm deducing from this experiment that the data merge needs to be done on a blank page. Which is counter productive to the Indesign mater page template. Any elements on the page need to exist as a a part of your data entry group and no other elements on the page. You only create one data entry group in the top corner of the page then use the data merge panel to position and duplicate. Otherwise, you will get a single page for each record you have with each record set 10-up in my case.
Recap:
Create a single non-facing page document with no intial text box. (if you have more than one page the Multiple Records option will be grayed out)
Only have 1 layer in this document
Set a single data entry set/group on the master page.
Do not include any other graphics. Put them in after the data merge.
Click the Create Merged Document button in the data merge panel
Select "Multiple Records" from the drop down list
Click the Multiple Record Layout tab at the top of the Data Merge panel
Click "Preview Multiple Record Layout" at the bottom of the Data Merge panel so you can see the Entry Sets with the data in place
Use the Margins and Layout or Records inputs to position the elements on the document (see note below)
Click OK when everything is in place the way you like it.
After the data merge is complete you will have a new document that should look like you want it to. Now you can go into this document and start adding your design elements.
NOTE: Positioning the content without the base graphics can be tough if not impossible. What I did in this situation is placed my positioning guides on the page then went through Steps 1-9 to set up the document for merge. Once my settings were set I then clicked "Cancel" and deleted my positioning guides and graphics. The problem I was having was due to these elements being on the page. Once I created the document I then pasted my template guides back into the final data merged master page for production.
Request to ADOBE: Fix this issue so we can design our layouts and position our data merge elements without having to backtrack.

If you insist in multi-record data merge, you can have static/variable graphic and text components work. But, create a 3.5 x 2 frame (3.75 x 2.25 card w/bleed) around all of these components, and make sure nothing extends beyond this bounding frame. If the composition prevents you from enclosing all components, then make a PDF of content that is imported in as one graphic.
Another suggestion: don't combine the functions of variable data merge with imposition.
Create a 1up layout of business card to data merge the variable info.
From this file, export to PDF.
Then impose the individual cards with: an imposition app, PDF plug-in, Indesign script, or even manual placement into another document.

Dependant(?) Data Merging

Windows 7, InDesign CS4, Excel 2010
I hope this makes sense:
     I have a project that involves making labels for about 800 SKUs. I've merged data before when making labels like this and it worked great (it's been a while though). Anyway, this project is different in that i have different labels depending on the product's category (i've got 10 categories) and I'm color coding them. I currently have an Excel Spreadsheet that is automatically updated from our inventory system/database that i am going to be pulling the data from that has ALL 800 skus on it.
     Basically, is there a way for InDesign to determine which label the entry should go into? Like, if i want to make all the labels for Category A (blue), will i be able to point InDesign at the spreadsheet and have it pull in those 80 Skus? Or if i tell it to merge, will it just merge everything in that spreadsheet?
     I'm trying to avoid having to get 10 different spreadsheets created (1 for each category) if at all possible.
EDIT: I guess i should specify, the spreadsheet does have info about what category it is in.
Thanks in advance!

without plugins, data merge in indesign doesn't have purpose-built "triggers" as such (i.e. if a field = x, then y happens elsewhere). Ultimately, the text file in the data merge has to contain the necessary information that will appear in the output. However, the file that makes the txt file (e.g. excel) can have triggers such as if/else statements, and it is there where any information should be added as an additional field.
For example, if a background in label A is to be blue and label B is to be green, files would need to be created for these different colored backgrounds (e.g. A.ai and B.ai) and then the trigger in excel would be if <<field>> = <<condition>> then <<a>> else <<b>> and would be its own column.
There are dozens of plug-ins that may be able to do this, but seeing a return on investment from the purchase of the software (some can be quite expensive) is another matter.
Apart from placing images, there are only two instances of data merge that can, in a way, be triggered.
1: GREP styles. If the incoming type fulfils the requirement of the GREP style, its appearance can be dramatically altered.
2: Use of ligatures by the special font FF Chartwell, specifically the bar font. More information: http://colecandoo.wordpress.com/2013/09/04/another-use-for-ff-chartwell-plotting-x-and-y-c oordinates/

Data Merge: Grouping data under a shared section title

I am a total newb to using data merge in indesign. I watched the "Automating a Catalog with Data Merge" video and found it very helpful. I am creating a catalog for an auto parts company so I have a csv file with a field for Make, Model, Year Range, Part Number. I use Make as a header and put the other information below it. I do not want it to repeat Make (Honda) over and over.
Rather than:
Honda
Accord         2005-2010     Part Number 4214-0100
Honda
Civic          2005-2010     Part Number 4214-0100
Honda
Odyssey     2005-2010     Part Number 4214-0100
I would like it to display:
Honda
Accord         2005-2010     Part Number 4214-0100
Civic          2005-2010     Part Number 4214-0100
Odyssey     2005-2010     Part Number 4214-0100
Can someone please give me some advice?
Thanks!

P Spier wrote:
JonMedford wrote:
I have tried this method but and I think this would suffice but it still doesnt format nicely. It puts too much space inbetween each row of data and not enough space between the sections I want to separate. I suppose I could do this by brute force once I get all of my data in, but this will be dreadful to do for a multiple hundred page catalog. Setting the merge to delete blank lines appears not to work. Not sure if this is a bug or not.
A real catalog plugin is probably the way to go, but if you stick with Data Merge you can control spacing with paragraph styles, most likely. Apply a style with Space Before added to the paragraph containing the section.
As far a removing blank lines, if the line isn't being removed, it probably means it isn't really blank. Blank means there can be NOTHING on the line except a field, and the field value in that record is null. If you have punctuation or white space of any sort on the line in additon to the field tag, it's never going to be blank, so you should be doing whatever concatenation you need in the data file first, as John mentioned.
I might just do that. I am staring at this 138 page manual for the Smart Catalog plugin and trying to use the darn thing with very little success. There is not GUI formatting available and it is really frustrating.

Data Merge with Lookup

i need to create a date merge document that includes a lookup field.
What we need is for one field to be a dropdown with list of all the options, when one of the options is selected the rest of the fields in the document is populated with the relevant information

That is not what data merge does. Think about it more along the lines of a mail merge.
I think you’re going to need to do this in Acrobat at a minimum and perhaps even LiveCycle.
I’d pop over to the Acrobat forum and see if anyone there has any scripts to help automate this.
Bob

FML Field Table - maximum number of fields?

Hello,
in our Tuxedo-environment we are using the "FML Field Table" (text file) to define fields and FLDIDs to access and manipulate fields in a fielded buffer.
My questions are:
o is there a maximum number of fields one can define in the field table?
o is it ok that this file grows very big if every application-relevant field is to be put into this table? (in our company we have services up to 80 fields...)
o is it better practice to define universal FML fields (such as CHAR_01, CHAR_02, NUMBER_01...) to avoid that every service-field has its own field-defínition?
Thank you for your help!

Hi,
1. FML/FML32 really have a maximum number.
# For FML: between 1 and 8191, inclusive
# For FML32: between 1 and 33,554,431, inclusive
But you should pay attention that some fields are reserved by Tuxedo, you can get the reference at http://edocs.bea.com/tuxedo/tux100/fml/fml04.html
2. It depends on how you use FML routines. Some routines, such as Fldid which map the name to the numeric identifier, sure it needs a little cpu cycle for the searching if you defined hundreds thousands of fields. But for most APIs, such as add/change/update/delete, the API only requires the numeric C macro definition, so there is no performance issue. A number of 80 fields is adequate absolutely. You should not worry about that in a very long future.
3. From my personal point of view, I think it is a good habit to define the fields universally in Tuxedo applications. You will feel more administration benefit if you want to extend Tuxedo to Java by JOLT, to web services by SALT etc.
Regards,
Wayne

InDesign Data Merge problem with field names

Hi to all.
I am trying to create a sales catalog with data merge. I have product name, description, old price, new price and image. However, when I select my .csv file as data source, InDesign recognizes different fields as one and puts them all together. I tried copying and pasting to new spreadsheet, retyping the info myself, saving as tab delimited and as comma delimited file. To better illustrate, here are exemplary screenshoots:
Please help, I don't understand what I am doing wrong. I'm a regular InDesign user for almost a decade, but I haven't used DataMerge until now, never needed it. I have basic knowledge in Excel, so if I did something wrong there please inform me (do I have to tell it somehow to "split" them into fields?).
Thank you in advance!

I would recommend to test with different export types in Excel like:
Tab-Divided txt files instead of csv or with different decoding.
When you have learned which is working fine, you can select this always in the future.
(There is also a possibility inside InDesign to change the type between tab separated text and CSV. In my experience it depends very much on the Excel version which would work. Microtrash has a bad history in localizing their programs, e.g. here in German, in numbers we write coma instead of a point, a point of a coma, so decided MS to exchange it every where on the Mac version with the outcome, that CSV files are not coma separated but dot separated and are not working on any data base import. So I can only use tab separated files.)

Data merge - can you insert multiple fields at once?

Hi,
I'm using InDesign CS4.
I'm automating a series of reports using Data Merge from a CSV file. Each row in the CSV file holds the data for each individual report - 135 reports in total.
The thing is, each report contains a text comments from some research interviews - but some reports have maybe 10 or so comments, others have over 600! The fields are called comment001, comment002 ... right up to comment620 (or so).
InDesign only seems to let me insert fields from the Data Merge one at a time - it won't let me Shift-select a range of fields ... the alternative is to manually insert about 620 fields one click at a time!! Ouch...
Does anyone know of a way around this?
(Hope I've explained the problem properly!)
Cheers,
F13

We see a few Adobe employees from time to time, notably Dov Isaacs and occasionally Matthew Laun (from the InDesign development team), but they are here on their own time and in an unofficial capacity, though they are extremely helpful when they do drop in. Employees are encouraged, at least on the ID team, to monitor the forums, but not necessarily to participate, so they probably do see most of the reported problems, but their jobs are to do development, not provide tech support, and I for one would rather they spend their time fixing bugs and developing new features than have them actively engaging in these threads.
And rest assured that Adobe appreciates the work that the user community is doing here. It's no secret that we are far better than the free telephone tech support, largely becasue we work with the programs every day while the suppot contractor only has relatively untrained folks reading from the knowledebase unless you can get escalated very high up the chain.
As for the feature request, by all means file it. I think you are correct that it would be nice, though I can see some issues, too, like how do you decide how multiple fields will be strung together (one after another would be the same as your concatenation problem and using separate lines might not be approprtiate in all cases, either). The place to file is Adobe - Feature Request/Bug Report Form

Data Merge FYI - can't name a field "table"

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