Data merge - multiple/different data on same page

[ogutuie]

Hello all,

Fellows, I have a simple question, how do I get from this to this, using Data merge? If not with Data merge, then how?

How do I suppose to prepare the excell file, formatted how, or maybe in InDesign some special import option, etc?

*the data is only like how I attached the example, I'm not talking about manual labor to split something or anything in excell, they're hundreds of data, I'm looking for an automated thing.

Thanks.

  

  

[SJRiegel]

In order to use Data Merge for this, your data would have to be re-arranged as follows:

There may be a way to automate this change in Excel, but that is beyond my knowledge base. 

Your InDesign doc would then be set like this:

 

 to give you this:

[ogutuie]

Wow, thanks man, thanks for your time you took to exemplify this, I know what you are saying, I'm fully aware of how it works, but just like you said, the secret is the excell file. How the data is arranged there.

Unfortunately the data from Info 1 and info 2 are quite random. I was afraid of this, of digging thru the formulas in excel to find some magic way to take the correct data from the correct cell and moving it to a different column.

pfffff, right, deep breath and dive into excell formulas

Thanks again.

[Peter Spier]

You'll need to have a column in the Excel file for every possible data value in your group (you said this is random, so if there might be three or more values in a group, you need that many columns) and a placeholder for each field on the template. That doen't mean there has to be data in each cell, just that the number of columns matches the maximum number of data units in a record.

[ogutuie]

whyyyyy are you so mean, why did you had to give this answer? 

🙂 Thanks for your time and help, yeap, I know, as I said before, I was afraid of this answer, but I really, really hoped that maybe is something I've missed.

Thank you all for your help.

*if magic solution appears, please don't be shy, share it :)))

[Peter Spier]

Well.... not magic and you still have a lot of manual work to do, so not really any better than adding columns, but you can put multiple "Info" lines into a single cell if you separate them with some sort of text string that does not otherwise appear in your data (I tend to use something like \n\n) with no hard or soft returns. After the merge you use Find/Change to find the separator string and change to a real break (frame, colun, forced line break or whatever).

I do this only when there is a very small number of records that would be involved. If your data set has multiple Info fields for each record, I would say this is actually more work than creating columns.