Vendor Signage Nightmare! Copy and Paste 200+ times? Or is there a better way?

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
October 30, 2023
1 reply
277 views

Hi!

I make the signage for a large holiday market. Each year I am provided with an excel sheet of 200+ names per location of the markets. When I started this job I was told the best way is to copy and paste each invididual name on separate pages. This is year 2 of this job and the markets keep growing and copy and pasting 200+ times really is gonna suck. We have our signage package build in InDesign so that we can have booth numbers via the page numbers in the document. Is there a easier way to add 200+ names to this document and have each name be on a different page?

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rob day

Community Expert

Hi @memonewyork99986290 , Look at Data Merge:

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/data-merge.html

M

memonewyork99986290Author

Participant

Would this work with an excel/spreadsheet? I tried adding it as a data source but the file is greyed out?

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

Take a closer look at the instructions that Rob linked for you. In "Basic steps for merging data" step 2 directs you to save a CSV file out of Excel. CSV stands for "Comma Separated Values" and is a kind of raw-text file format to represent tabular data.

PageNumber,VendorName
1,FirstVendorName
2,SecondVendorName
3,ThirdVendorName

I suggest that you at least scan the whole HelpX article; there are quite a few things you have to line up correctly to do a data merge. You can totally skip the bits about images and QR codes and merging multiple records, as they don't apply to your project.

It might be faster to copy/paste 100 names by hand than it would be to read the whole help article and set up the data merge. However, if you have it set up correctly, next year you'll be able to run merges in the time it'd take you to copy and paste maybe three names.

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