Formatting Options with Data Merge

Find/Change can be done over all open InDesign documents.

If that is what you asked.

See:

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/user-guide.html/indesign/using/find-change.ug.html

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

Hi Nemesis666first,

you could include a unique sequence of characters and in a second step after the merge is done do a Find/Replace that sequence to a return or a line break.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

Any idea how put a word in Bold or, simple "return to the line" ?

Data Merging is really powerful, but simple tasks look like a pain in the A.

My $0.02:

Data Merge is great for Microsoft Word style mail merges that are one record (not one field, but one record - a row of fields) to one page or one record to many pages, but not so great for many records to one or many pages, such as a catalogue.

I agree with Uwe that InDesign can certainly create catalogues using its other automation features such as XML or third party plug-ins such as:

• 65 Bit Software: EasyCatalog;
• Cacidi Extreme;
• Em Software: Incatalog;
• Meadows Publishing Software: Designmerge;
• Teacup Software: Datalinker;

A full list of plug-ins is available here: InDesign plug-ins, free third-party plug-ins

It is possible to create your own XML solution, but from personal experience I've found the learning curve steep (but not impossible): There are courses on LinkedIn Learning that focus on this, but a resource I use and recommend was a book by Jim Maivald - a Designer's Guide to Adobe InDesign and XML (ISBN 9780321503558)

Phew ! It's a nice setup you're trying to build :-)

And it might just work with a two-step approach.

InDesign doesn't offer any conditional formatting upon importing text or generating content with data merge. At best, it just interprets styles. The only feature which can define very precise conditions (and act upon it) is GREP. Using textual indicators in your data like "do-show" or "no-show" and "heading" or "subhead", you can let GREP search for these indicators, and apply Cell and Paragraph Styles to those texts, including settings like "Start on next page". And items/rows/paragraphs can disappear by letting GREP delete (actually Find/Replace) the whole paragraph by searching for the indicator.

However, there are challenges in this approach.

How to switch from products to headings and let headings span across the whole text box ? It's an available Paragraph setting, but then the base for the layout needs to be a multi-column text frame, carefully measured to have this image as an anchored element in the text flow. And those color backgrounds and boxes can be achieved with Paragraph Shading and Borders. Or are you willing to dig into Object Styles ?

So it will take quite some tinkering and tweaking to get it all up and running, but it all seems feasible to me. Though it won't be very flexible when you want to vary your layout afterwards...

InDesign is not intended to deal with this kind of catalogue automation.

When you're serious about it, then consider using Adobe FrameMaker.