About data merge and hyperlinks

[hydrosound]

Hi! About data merge, is it possible to get the hyperlink (mailto:hi@hello.com) when getting an email address text from .txt?

I mean, I have an Excel file with a column with email addresses: john.doe@hello.com, mary.doe@hello.com, zoe.doe@hello.com...) and I can make a data merge to populate my inDesign file with these email adresses...but I would like to get the hyperlink associated to every email address, too (mailto: john.doe@hello.com).

Is it possible?

Thank you!

[Steve Werner · Accepted solution]

I don't think it's possible by using the Data Merge function itself. But after you have created your InDesign data, you can go to the Hyperlinks panel menu (at least in InDesign CC) and choose Convert URLs to Hyperlinks which uses a Search method to find hyperlinks.

[hydrosound]

Thank you very much. I know that feature and it's very helpful but I was also considering another situation: a Column in my database with names and another one with the email asdresses and then display the PDF with the names with the links to the email addresses.

Thank you very much for your quick answer anyway

[Arun Ankam]

Hi, Have you ever been able to find a solutions to add hyperlinks from database? I have a couple thousand links in a CSV file where the titles themselves shoudl have the hyperlinkns instead of showing the url on a separate line.

[Kelby]

And still in 2020 desiring a solution or a feature to be added.

[kilsknoll]

Same here that would be very nice indeed.

[patMorita]

I know this might be a little late but as Adobe didn't find any solution yet i wanted to share what we do. We use MyDataMerge (https://mydatamerge.com) which adds many valuable features to InDesigns data merge including dynamically generated hyperlinks (video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAuQ3KsTJck) . It's free with all features for a limited amount of records and it creates interactive PDFs with custom names (enough for our usage but its pricing still is cheap compared to other solutions like easyCatalog)

We also used hyperlink conversion but the cons of this in InDesign are:

• You have to do that for every single document or use another script to split your merged document
• You cannot directly merge into interactive PDFs
• The text is the same than the underlying link, with MyDataMerge you can have any word (from your database or static) linked with a custom URL (from your database or static)

Cons of MyDataMerge:

• macOS only

Thats what Adobe should build in.