Phone directory - mass text formating

Question

Hi,
I had question concerning tabs and leaders and figured it out with the help of the forum but I am having trouble with some other things. Please share your thoughts on the following.
My task:
- I need to take a excel file (or csv) (see attached file) That has about 6,000 phone directory listing entries ( Name, Address, Phone number) and pull it into my document (Indesign) and format it exactly like the the old phone directory was done (see attached sample indesign file).
- The white pages format is: Name+(2 spaces)+Address+(leader periods that expand or retract as needed)+Phone number
- for the names and addresses that are to long for the first line I will need to kick the Address and phone number to the next line with a hanging indent I think it is called, at .0625 inches.
- I am obviously trying not to have to put in spaces and returns for 6,000 entries. For the spaces maybe I can use some style with a en or em space or nested style?
- I am wanting to format the type once, however Indesign would do that.
- So how do I do this with Indesign or even some other inexpensive plugins. I understand if some of this cant be done in Indesign but just let me know what you think.
Files attached: file size total 2.3mb
- the excel file of phone listings
- The Indesign file sample of about 7pages is extracted from the 178 page previous Phone directory. Disregard it being messy, cutting up the document made things shift but you will see how it is formated from pages 4-7. Disregard any notice for missing links to images.
- fonts
Thanks

Answer 1

Kenneth C. Benson wrote:
Your attachment is still queued, however, here are my thoughts.
I'm guessing your Excel file has Name, Address, and Phone Number in three columns (or more). I would format each column with a unique code, like {1} for Name, {2} for Address, {3} for Phone Number. Save to CSV, import into ID. Now you've got something like:
{1}Ken Benson, {2}129 Longview Dr.,, Chatham,, NY 12037, {3}[phone]
Search for double commas (the "real" commas) and replace with another code, like {comma}. Search for single comma followed by space and delete them all. Search for {comma} and replace with a comma. Now you should have:
{1}Ken Benson{2}129 Longview Dr., Chatham, NY 12037{3}[phone]
Search for {2} and replace with an em space. Search for {3} and replace with a tab. Search for {1} and delete it.
Swipe the whole thing and format with a style that applies a hanging indent and a right-aligned leader-dot tab.
Done. Should take about 15 minutes.
In reality, your Excel file probably has separate columns for Address1, Address2, Town, State, etc. Just put in unique number codes in every column and collapse them to spaces or commas, as appropriate, in Indesign.
Ken
PS: I have a feeling this is what Data Merge or XML is supposed to do. Haven't figured them out yet.
I've notified the appropriate people that the file is still queued.
Indeed Data Merge is useful for this kind of work (said without seeing the files), but you get a separate frame for each record, which can be a pain, so I'm not sure it's any easier. You need a script (I think Peter Kahrel wrote one) to thread the frames when you are done.
To further complicate things, there are a number of problems reported in CS4's data merge which were not present in earlier releases, most having to do with empty fields in a record.
Peter