In this video, we're going to take this boring old Excel file with all this data in it,
and then make it work in InDesign by creating these placeholders,
first name, last name, company,
and then generating a file that has loads of people's names in it.
You can see here, I made a hundred.
Cool. Let's go and do that now in InDesign.
The first thing we need to do is we're going to create our little swing tags,
so we're going to go to "File," "New Document."
Now best thing to do for size is to go down to
your local stationary supplies store and just
figure out what the plastic little sleeve that they go into, the size it takes.
I'm pretty sure they all use inches,
even if you're not in America.
Four inches by three inches,
but go and check just to make sure,
sometimes the business cards sizes is just to take business cards.
But we're going to use the four inch by three inch.
In terms of this one we're going to set the margins to
zero just because I just don't need them for this case.
In terms of the blade,
we'll use eighth of an inch,
so 0.125, or three millimeters all round.
Great. I'm going to grab my rectangle tool,
I'm going to draw a rectangle that covers this bottom bit.
That's where the company name's going to go and I'm going to flip with our red paint.
It's not part of that because it's a new document,
so I am going to click it over here.
I'll make it a little bit smaller.
Next thing I want to do actually is bringing my logo file place in your 05 Data Merge.
There is one called green logo.
Bring them in and get them about there.
W, it's going to be okay, maybe. A little bit there.
Now we need to connect the Excel file.
The trouble is, Excel won't actually connect directly.
Weirdly you have to open up your Excel file in Excel,
which is not weird, I guess.
that's the wrong file. Let's open them up.
We're going to start with this one here,
the Garden Awards Attendees and that's what this file looks like.
You can see there's lots and lots of data in this one.
But the XLS is or the XLXS won't work,
you just need to open up an Excel or Google Docs,
whatever you can to open it up and go to a File just do a Save As.
Instead of our XLSX,
we're going to drop that down and go to this one that says CSP.
That's the one that InDesign can accept.
Don't need to change anything else. Hit save.
I have already done it for us in our examples.
If I connect it now,
it's going to connect to the CSV,
but not the Excel file.
Let's open up our data image panel.
Let's got a window, let's go down to utilities,
let's go to dot image.
It tells you what to do here.
But the first one is the merge here and we're going to click on Select Data source.
Remember, you can see these ones that are grayed out,
it won't work for these.
I'm in 05 data image and we're going to work with the Garden Awards attendees.
If I jump back into Excel,
you can see it's bolt through the hitting names or the column names.
If you don't have these,
go into your file and just add them to it.
It's going to make life easier you working in
InDesign ,you might have to insert a row and just type them in.
Cool. You don't have to use all of these.
I want first name, last name,
I don't want the entry fee,
I don't want the email address or entry date,
I want the company name.
Cool. You can decide on what you want to have,
I'm going to move that off to the side,
I'm going to grab my type two,
and I'm going to draw a nice big type box.
It is there. All I need to do is mucosa fleshing.
I'm going to cut the word first name,
put our attention on a keyboard and put in last name.
Cool. I'm going to style this now to look like it did in the early part of this video.
I'm going to move them so they are centered.
I'm going to highlight these guys and make them centered.
They both going to be roboto.
This is going to be bold. Where is bold?
there is it. I'm going to increase this one here.
I'm going to max out the size. How big?
You'll have to look at your names list and see how many characters that person has.
You've got somebody with a really big foreign name,
you might have to have a slightly smaller font.
We can test it, it's easy enough.
Select it all. I'm going to make it the green color.
This guy here is going to be the light version.
Now I'm just messing around designing.
Now it's hard to work with his first name, last name.
What we can do is see it says preview in the corner.
It will pull through only the first entry from your database list.
So Robyn Ward, not very long,
so it's going to fit just fine.
I'm going to select the role and just make it a bit bigger.
Here we go. You can cycle through them see this arrow?
I'm going to go through Robyn Ward,
Mark Rose, Lyty, Sergio.
We got lots of names and none of them are very long,
so this is going to work out just fine.
This is not actually done ,this is just previewing.
You can it turn on and off, but it's not meant to be the finished one.
There's a last part of this to this, to export it.
This is just previewing it through.
There's one more thing I need to do,
is my company name.
I've got nothing selected, grabbed my talk to,
drag out a box, and I'm going to click in company. I'm going to do the same thing.
I'm going to center it, grab it.
Some of the company names get quite long,
so I'm going to have it so it's all the way across.
Oop, not that far across.
I'm going to use my eyedropper tool like we did earlier,
I'm going to grab all of this.
Grab my eye dropper tool still that one.
I've got the roboto thing,
make it a little bit smaller maybe make the font paper.
Hit preview and you can see some of these business names are a lot longer,
so I'm probably going to have to go smaller on the font.
Select all the list.
A bit smaller, hope this fits in.
I might have to do a print as well,
because this is printing at thirteen points.
It's not very tiny, but it might be maybe a little too
thin to read so I'm going to go up to regular.
Let's have a look through a few of these.
They look like they're all going to fit.
Cool. That is how you can connect the two up.
The next thing I want to do is I want to export this thing.
First of all, I'm going to save it. Let's save it.
Let's call this one on my desktop,
in my InDesign class files,
this is going to be called my Green at
Heart awards night tags and I'll call this one V1.
To save it, I need to turn this off.
Saved. This here is like the template,
you're going to end up with two files.
You've got this one plus the one you generate with all the names in it.
You can click this little icon here,
create merge document, click on this.
There's a few different options,
we're just going to leave it all as standard
because it's probably what you're going to need to do.
Let's click Create.
What happens is I've got two files open at the moment,
but it's generated a third.
A nice little thing that appears here is no overset text were generated.
Overset text is that little red cross in the corner that says the text couldn't fit.
This is going to be good, so you're doing business cards and it's for
like I've done jobs for 10,000 people,
at a big company and you hit that button.
You don't want to have to go and double check 2,000 names or
10,000 names to see if any of those names are too long and won't fit.
This is just telling you, "Don't worry, all is cool."
The difference between this one which is my template,
which has got first name, last name,
place holders and the second one is the naming.
Can you see here, it's called V-1,
that's got a hyphen one.
It's not super clear.
But if I save this one now, instead of hyphen one,
I might give it a bit of name,
I might call this one,
I can't think of a better name.
Don't call it final, remember that'll kill it's job.
We need to call it, calling
it output because I can't think of a better name at the moment.
Just call the first one template and then the next one not template.
It's saved and what we can do is look at the pages panel,
which mine is disappeared.
Window, let's go to Pages.
I drag it back in here.
I know why I dragged that out.
I was using a very different project while I was making these tutorials.
As you can see, I have a page one,
page two, page three,
and you'll see, you see all these names here it's made a document with all of these.
If I'm printing in the office, I can hit print,
obviously I can print, what is it a hundred different names.
Or I can send this to the print it out and now to get printed
and hopefully get trimmed up and then send back
to me so I can put them into
the little clear name sleeves at the welcome desk when people arrive.
I got my hot seat on this gala night to hell,
even though I've totally just made this thing up.
But anyway, I'm sure it will be the great night that my friends is Data merge.