Deleting Items And Moving Items Automaticly

Question

This is probably a rookie question, but I am new to ID. What is the best way to setup an ID document where if I delete a text box and photo in one row, that the rest of the rows on the pages after move up automatically and line up like I had the deleted row? Or does this have to be done manually?
Reason I am asking is I have a document which is a directory of employees with a description on the left hand side, photos on the right hand side, and I have to remove employees who have left the company. These documents are pages and I would hate to have to manually move everything after that deleted employee.

Answer 1

If it turns out that nothing is threaded and the images are not anchored, and you don't have some sort of database from which to rebuild, my personal plan of attack would be to make a copy of the file, then cut the first image frame and paste it into the start of the first line of text in the listing.
Select the anchored frame and go to Object > Anchored Object > Options... and change the type to "custom" and make the x-coordinate relative to the page or margin and the y-coordinate realtive to the Line. Drag the image frame back to its correct postion in the right column.You may have to revisit the options dialog to get the y-offset where it needs to be. Make a note of the settings.
With it still selected, open the Object Styles panel and check to see if a style is assigned. Most likely, it will have [No Style] because that's the default for any object drawn with a frame tool. If that's true, create a new Object Style which should include the posioning information for anchored objects, as well as any fitting options you need. If there's already a named style assigned, edit the style to include the anchored object settings. Apply the style to the selected frame.
If the frames you checked above had [No Style] assigned, and you are using a version of ID that has Find/Change for objects, you can search for objects with [No Style] and change to the object style you created. If there was already a style, this step is unnecessary. The good news here is that even though you are adding anchored object positioning information to potentially every image inthe document (even those that have nothing to do with the listings), unless the object is actually anchored those settings will have no effect whatever. The bad news is exactly the same thing -- you won't see any changes to the employee images until you go through the file and manually cut them and paste into position inthe first line of the listing (and when you paste there they should appear back where they belong). Move the empty frames too, just in case a image is added later and to be sure the empty frame is deleted along with the corresponding name when that gets removed.
Hard part is now done. Next step is to go to Rorohiko,com and get their TextStitch script (http://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/indesign-downloads/textstitch/). Run the script, delete all but the first two pages of listings, and then delete all but the first lisiting frame on the first page. Resize the frame to fill the page, then pick up the overset and hold Shift as you click at the top of the next page to autoflow the rest of the listings back into the file.