Company Phone Directory Import

[#1]

Im looking to create a company phone directory based from the import of a spreadsheet/delimited file. It would list the Department and each employee associated with the department as well as their extension.

Spreadsheet

Department	Name	Extension
Admin	John Doe	1234
Admin	Jane Doe	2345
Business	Howie Doe	7890
Business	Mowie Doe	5678

PDF Build

Admin

John Doe     1234

Jane Doe     2345

Business

Howie Doe     7890

Mowie Doe     5678

Any chance this is possible?

[#2]

Im looking to create a company phone directory based from the import of a spreadsheet/delimited file. It would list the Department and each employee associated with the department as well as their extension.

Spreadsheet

Department	Name	Extension
Admin	John Doe	1234
Admin	Jane Doe	2345
Business	Howie Doe	7890
Business	Mowie Doe	5678

PDF Build

Admin

John Doe     1234

Jane Doe     2345

Business

Howie Doe     7890

Mowie Doe     5678

Any chance this is possible?

[#3]

Sure. The first two fields can be drop-downs and the last one a text field, and they populate each other based on the selections made in them. I've created scripts that implement exactly this kind of thing, including one that lets you set it up based on a spreadsheet. You can find it here: Custom-made Adobe Scripts: Acrobat -- Create Cascading Dropdowns

[#4]

You just want to create a flat PDF of the list?

[#5]

A flat PDF would be fine. I dont want to list the Department for each employee though. I want to 'group' by department and then list the name and extension.

[#6]

Acrobat has a report generator that would let you create a document via JavaScript but you really don't want to do that. It's not as flexible as you might hope. You could also do it by creating free text annotations via JavaScript and then flatten the document but again, you really don't want to do that. It's non-trivial if the list needs to break across pages.

My best advice is to learn how to group rows by column in your spreadsheet and then create the PDF from there.

[#7]

This is typically a job for InDesign

[#8]

Or just Word. It’s what Word calls a mail merge. Then save the finished Word file as PDF. Everything else is much harder.