Labels that rely on a seperate document *PLEASE HELP*

[skincareBMD]

Hello everyone, can someone please help and shed some light on our little problem that we have.

We make skin care products and we private label them to our customers. We have a few thousand customers and for each customer we copy our current MASTER label and paste it into their customer folder in the network drive. My question is whenever our company reformulates a product we have to go into each product for ALL of our customers and re-update the ingredients on the labels for EVERYONE!

Does anybody know if there is a way in illustrator to have the information such as ingredients, description, directions be relied on a master document so that all we do is alter or change the master document and all the text for all of our customers gets updated? I dont care if its a word document, excel, pdf or an ai document. Reason for this is that our company is updating the ingredients on several products and if we cant figure something out, we will have work for DAYS! non stop updating ingredients on all of our customers labels.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[edgrimley]

Using text variables is the first thing that comes to mind.

[Ton Frederiks]

Did you try to make the ingredients a seperate Illustrator file and place it as a linked file into the customer label documents?

If you change the ingredients file, the customer labels will be updated when opened.

[skincareBMD]

That is a great idea and it does work however there is just one small problem. The person printing the labels will be opening up the files from adobe acrbat and the changes on the ingredients will not reflect until one of us designers opens up that label and accepts the prompt that says there was changes.

But i do appreciate your input, almost there.