Data Merge “Did you know” Part One

Regulars to the site will know that many of my articles relate to InDesign’s Data Merge feature. Given the amount of tutorials already available online elsewhere concerning basic tutorials for Data Merge, the Colecandoo site focuses more on articles about Data Merge in relation to scripts, GREP styles, or advanced techniques.

But there is a middle-ground that hasn’t been covered in many Data Merge tutorials, nor here on Colecandoo, so over the next two articles, I will attempt to bridge that gap and highlight some lesser known issues that can become a problem if users aren’t initially aware of them.

Can’t package the data or links used in the data

When InDesign packages an INDD file, it will save a copy of the file and copy any links used in the document into a Links folder, and any fonts used (within licensing restrictions) to a Document fonts folder.

However, this does not extend to the source data of a Data Merge file, nor any links that the source data may refer to.

PDF made from merge is different to regular PDF

I have written about this before but ultimately when exporting a PDF directly from Data Merge, it makes a variety of PDF that is similar but not the same as a usual PDF, as the following options cannot be chosen.

• The ability to merge to an interactive PDF
• The page range (not the record range)
• Spreads
• Create Tagged PDF
• Create Acrobat Layers
• Hyperlinks

I’ve speculated why this might be the case in this article but until this addressed, it is a consideration to be aware of.

Headers with the same name

If the headers in a database are exactly the same name, InDesign’s Data Merge will add a sequential number after the first instance of the field name to make a distinction between the field names.

Colons can cause weird issues in the header

This featured briefly in my creative pro article “Troubleshooting data merge errors” but in short, colons used in field names can cause one of two dialog boxes when used in particular circumstances. Thankfully, if a colon appears at the start or end (or both) of a field name, the data will import without any issues, but if a colon is within the field, then a dialog box with the words “Generic extended parser error” appears.

If there are two or more colons in the field name (neither at the start or end of a field name), a dialog box that says “not well formed” appears.

UTF-16 is the format built for Data Merge

InDesign’s Data Merge is designed with UTF-16 text in mind. However, CSV and TXT files exported from programs such as Microsoft Excel usually export to UTF-8.

This is usually fine for most circumstance in English, but can cause problems when:

• using an alphabet other than the Roman alphabet;
• the data contains punctuation or characters that may not be available via UTF-8

Excel does have an option to export to UTF-16 and it is worth using. The option is here when exporting via Excel:

In part two of this Did You Know series, we will look at other lesser known phenomenon, such as:

• Data is there even if link is missing
• Merge fields can be removed via the hyperlinks panel
• Shift clicking during the import does not show options
• The benefits of linked images in the same folder as the source text file

If you have any lesser-known Data Merge behaviours that you think would easily make this list, please feel free to mention them in the comments.