Staff Directory Auto Formatting?

[hfrynd]

Hello,

My company has a staff directory in InDesign with staff portraits, their name, title and position. As of now, when staff leave or there are new hires the design team manually removes or inserts portraits which then shift the order of all other portraits on the rows after it. As the company grows this task will become more and more tedious and time consuming. 

I'm wondering if anyone knows of any solutions, perhaps a variable data plugin, that might auto-format the pages when people are added or removed?

Thanks!

[SJRiegel]

You could accomplish this via Data Merge. You will need a folder will all the photos, and the portraits named consistently based on one or two of the other fields in the directory. 

Set up a spreadsheet with all of the info, including the name of the portrait file and set up your InDesign template with just one instance of an entry. (the column for the portrait file names needs to begin with '@ so Data Merge will recognize that column as containing images). Export the excel spreadsheet as tab-delimited text and put it in the folder with the portraits. 

When you have a new entry or someone leaves, edit the spreadsheet, re-export it and run a new merge from the InDesign template file. 

There are more robust third-party solutions for this, but Data Merge has the advantage of being built into InDesign, so it comes with no extra cost.

[hfrynd]

This is amazing, thank you so much for all of the details!!!