Data Merge with Multiple Records Per Page - Repetition of Mostly One Record
- May 19, 2022
- 1 reply
- 1810 views
I have spent about half a day trying to Data Merge about 300 custom donation slips, 3 to a page. Everything looks great in the preview, but when I create the merged document, it repeats just one person's information (usually from line 5), with a couple of other people sprinkled in on the second page. While the person who gets repeated has changed once during my various attempts, I can't tell what is going on or how to fix it. Things I've tried:
- Copying everything into a new document and merging without previewing (attempted multiple times), which has worked for others on here who've had similar questions
- Making multiple versions of the data source file (tab-delimited .txt, Unicode .txt, CSV that's never accepted by InDesign, deleting most lines, deleting most unnecessary columns, including a version with fake addresses
- Restarted InDesign (multiple times) and my computer
- Exported my original .INDD file to .IDML (multiple times overall, only once for this problem)
- I updated to the latest version of InDesign while trying to resolve other issues earlier the Data Merge process
About
Merging content: numbers in one text box and name/address in another text box
Data source: tab-delimited .txt file, exported from Excel and edited in Notepad/Notepad++, with no errors that I can find. I've shrunk this file to about 20 lines and deleted columns that the merge doesn't require, but that doesn't make a difference. A CSV version won't work at all.
Current InDesign version: 17.2.1
Computer: Dell XPS 15 running Windows 10, SSD that's about 85% full
Attached are a badly-merged PDF (notice that the 4th slip's address combines the repeating record and the real one), a dummy address file, and a screenshot of the pre-merging file. (Note: I removed a couple of text boxes from the master page to reduce clutter.)
Thank you for your help!
P.S. I was about to post this and then found something that works with my dummy file: export to IDML, then copy everything from the IDML into a new document, then create a merged document without previewing. But is there anything easier/simpler out there? Thank you.
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