Catalog Data Merge Plugins

Hi — this thread still turns up in searches, so a note for anyone landing here now.

At a few thousand products across several section layouts, what defeats native Data Merge usually isn't the record count. It's that Data Merge binds one template to one dataset: as soon as product families need genuinely different layouts, you end up maintaining several merge documents and assembling the output by hand. Images are the other common failure — missing or inconsistently named assets break more catalogue merges than any layout issue.

Worth settling before choosing any tool: do your sections differ in layout, or only in styling? If it's only styling, object and nested styles may get you there with no plugin at all.

Colin Flashman's material at colecandoo.com is the most thorough free writing on InDesign data merge at this scale. Beyond that, several commercial plugins address it — I develop one of them, a paid UXP plugin suite for variable data publishing, which I mention for disclosure rather than as a pitch. Happy to discuss the approach either way.

If you are on Mac and look for something easy to use have a look at MyDataMerge (https://mydatamerge.com) Usable and affordable

In my day-to-day use of InDesign, I do not use any catalog plug-ins as we don't set up many catalogs... could be a catch 22 I suppose. I've only gone as far as the trial versions and even then I didn't have live jobs to test them on, so I'm afraid I'm not much help there.

Thanks, Colin. I'll look into the free trials. Have you used any? In your experience which was the most intuitive? I'm more of an indesign/illustrator person than an excel person, so I'm looking for something that'll be easier to work with.

There are five usual go-tos for catalog plug-ins:

• InData and InCatalog – emsoftware.com
• EasyCatalog – 65bit.com
• LiveMerge and Extreme – cacidi.com
• Designmerge – meadowsps.com
• Datalinker - teacupsoftware.com

Each retailer offers demo versions of their software for evaluation, so it's worth trying the trial versions to see if one application is a better fit over another.

Be aware though that any users who open a file that used the plug-in may receive a "missing plug-in" warning upon opening the file.