So we wanna make sure that we have that as well. If it's not there, I am gonna have to put Macintosh user, my user, et cetera, et cetera, wherever it lives and that's kind of a pain. If I have that in the same place when I go to bring this all into InDesign, then I don't need to put the whole entire path file or the path name where this lives because it knows it's gonna look first in that same folder. Now, I don't have the whole path name and that's because where this lives, I have the CSV file that I'm going to create from this worksheet here sitting in the same folder as all the photos. So then what I did is I just have the name of the file. And so it let's it know that that is an actual at. So if it yells at you if you put at and it tells you you can't do it, you might need to put an apostrophe before that and that's actually what I have. And this is where it gets a little tricky, the header needs to be called at photos but, and I am not sure if they've fixed this, it seemed to be improved, but long ago you used to have to, at least on the Mac, put an apostrophe before the at because Excel uses at as a special function. I have their title, I have a quote that I wanted them to put in the little annual report here, and then I also have a list of photos. So I have this spreadsheet and I have names, so everybody's name that's there. So I just wanted to look at what we have in this file itself. And again, if you don't have Excel that's alright because a lot of times you're just given this Excel file or what we really wanna end up with is a CSV file which we'll do in a second. We can go back to the finder and I started with this Excel file. So let's actually look at what we're starting with. I accidentally linked my CSV file and now it keeps looking for it. So I need to go into my blank one, which I don't have anything for.

And what I wanna do is I wanna be able to lay one out and have it populate with all the other ones that are here. This is what I'm going to try to end up with here. And let's actually look at what I am going to create.

So we're going to use data merge for that. So think of like if you had an Excel file that has all your part numbers in it, so all your parts, all your part numbers, all the descriptions, maybe the price, and also photos for that and you want it to automatically create a layout for you on the fly, we can do that. But it is what it is, we're merging data and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take data that I have in an Excel file and I'm gonna use that to help automate my layout. Good luck and let me know if this helps you at all.The next thing we're gonna go over is data merge which sounds boring, again, sometimes I think we just need to come up with our own naming on some of these operations that we do. Not sure why and don't really mind since it works. However if I saved my document with the merged data as a PM 6.5 document, then when I tried to 'Place' all the records appeared as stories. One quirk I found was that if I tried to place the document as is, nothing appeared in the list of 'stories' to be placed. This may fix the text flow for your fields if everything is in one text block. I was told that they may well come in 'out of order' since PM reads text blocks by page position, not by what you see on the page, but for me they all came in in the right order. When you select 'Place' a list of all the records will appear, select all 'stories' and they will come into the new document as one text block. Then I used 'Place' to put all the 'stories' from the original into the new one.

I have found a solution to my problem that was suggested to me at the adobe forums.

Indesign data merge multiple records