Data Merge Problem InDesign CS5

These answers were so perfect! Unfortunately, I still could not get my titles to work, although I dinked with them for quite some time.  I finally figured out that several of my columns started with a "#". I tried turning the titles all to 'text' but it did not help. I finally thought to remove the # symbol and it worked perfectly. (Facepalm) Thanks all for your other suggestions - they were great!

Just had this problem, I was seriously stumped. I went back and edited almost everything I could think of  in the spreadsheet and was still getting a message that same message, even though nothing was missing. When I copy & pasted, I realized that somehow my column labeled E had been deleted, and my spreadsheet went from column D to column F. I can only guess that it was reading column E as empty. Hopefully this will help some one else! Also, the copy & paste did ultimately solve my problem so thank you SJRiegel

SJRiegel's solution worked for me. Thanks.

Encountered this same problem with an Excel file when I was saving two separate CSV's from the same worksheet. One worked fine, the second didn't. Finally succeeded in fixing the second CSV by using SRiegel's suggestion from above, copying and pasting only the data columns into a new worksheet. Thanks for the tip!

I've come across this problem frequently when opening up a .csv file in InDesign to use data merge. You must have a heading in each column that you have text in the excel file.

ex: Line 1 cell A would be "name", cell B would be "address", and so on.

I kept running into this problem while trying to merge business card data from an Excel spreadsheet i had saved as a .txt file. The client had sent the city, state ZIP info in one field that i named "City" but some of the entries, for some reason, had split cells that did not show up until i added borders to the spreadsheet. then i could see which cells were split into columns that did not contain headings. i merged those fields all into the column "city" and finally my InDesign merge worked. Hope that helps.

It sounds like perhaps you forgot to add the names for the fields in the very first row.