InDesign Merging with Conditions

[patriciag25474359]

I need some help because I've hit a wall. I have designed car tag pick up cards for parents to pickup their child(ren). Each grade division needs to be a different color (ie: elementary, middle, high). I can get the merge to work great but I need the merge to hold a conditional formatting from Excel in terms of the color OR does anyone know how to set a condition in InDesign based on a grade level and turn that grade level to a color? Does that make sense? I need each child to merge with a color based on their grade division. Is it possible... everything I see says NO? 

[danaken3]

It may help to provide a screenshot of your InDesign template to show what you'd like to change the color of (is it text, a background color, a graphic element? etc.). There may not be a direct solution via data merge but perhaps we can figure out a different way to accomplish it. 

[patriciag25474359]

I can format the InDesign to do this and merge fine, but the problem is - what if the second child needs to also be yellow or red? I would have to format each finished merge separately and it's about 800 students so I am hoping (but not looking good) to have it recognize the grade and make the color according to the school division. 

[danaken3 · Accepted solution]

I would put the grade and name in the same paragraph — that way, after you do the data merge, you can do a GREP find-and-replace to apply the color to both the grade and the name at the same time.

1. Insert a tab before the first name, adjust the tab stop in the paragraph style so it's where you want it, insert a line break (not a hard return) after the first name, and in the paragraph style apply a hanging indent that aligns with your tab stop. 

2. For each color, create a new paragraph style, based on the existing paragraph style, with the only difference being the font color (or you could create a new character style for each color).

3. Use a GREP find-and-replace to apply the new style. For example, each of the following lines is what your Find what field might look like for each grouping of grade levels (adjust the items in the parentheses as you need to, separated by vertical slashes):

^(K1|K2)\t.+\n.+
^(1st|2nd|3rd|4th|5th)\t.+\n.+
^(6th|7th|8th)\t.+\n.+
^(9th|10th|11th|12th)\t.+\n.+

Leave the Change to field blank, and in the Change Format field select your desired style.

[patriciag25474359]

Hmmm that might just work. I'm going to try it right now. Thanks so very much! 

[patriciag25474359]

It worked! You are a lifesaver. I appreciate your expertise. Taught me something new. I had to change my spreadsheet to match but I just did a find/replace on that too.  I'm going to video me doing it so I will remember for May when we roll this out... otherwise, I will forget since it's going to be a once a year thing.