Five InDesign Data Merge Tutorials

One of the most common uses for Data Merge is to create a business card. In a company with many employees, it is essential that every business card produced has the correct layout. This tutorial teaches you the basics of successfully creating a merged document. It is available both in video and text format, and it is part of a series where you can also learn the basics of Adobe Illustrator.

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Catalogs and price lists are often very repetitive and data-driven documents. Thanks to Data Merge, it is possible to easily create catalogs with tables, images, and descriptions.

Here at Pagination, we specialize in creating beautiful catalogs and data-driven documents. Our tutorial on Data Merge goes in depth on how to correctly set up data files and how to automatically import images to create a car catalog.

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Creating infographics can be very time consuming; they are often data-driven and the initial form of the data is a spreadsheet. In this tutorial, the author uses Data Merge to automatically create elements containing data that he then will use to create an infographic page for a magazine.

This approach to Data Merge is very eye-opening. Usually, Data Merge is used to create end products; here, it is used as a tool to easily create pieces of a bigger puzzle.

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Why buy a planner when you can make it by yourself? This video is a very detailed tutorial on how to create a planner starting from a spreadsheet. This tutorial is an example of how to combine Excel and the Data Merge function of InDesign.

It is especially useful to see how the author laid out the InDesign document that is going to be automated, and how she organized the spreadsheet.

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This tutorial shows an interesting approach. The author is an employee of a creative agency, which uses Data Merge to create presentation-worthy documents to showcase their ideas and process.

In the design field, presenting ideas in the right way to the clients is the key to successful partnerships. Often, ideas and processes go from sketchbooks or whiteboards to a spreadsheet, so why not go a step further and also create beautiful documents?

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