INDESIGN DATA MERGE TUTORIAL FULL

Go to your window menu at the top and choose Automation> Data Merge. Simply put, make the text look how you want the final piece to look. You can make the name larger and bold, the city and state italicized, etc.

It is important to do this now, before we create the badges, otherwise you will have to format each individual badge, which is what we are trying to get out of doing. Here, you can format each text box to specify the look that you want. Grab the text tool and create text boxes where you want each bit of information to be on every name badge. With this done, it is time to go back to InDesign. This is so that InDesign can pick this up and properly distribute the information. This is very important- you need to save it as a tab delimited file. Once this is done, it is time to save the document. This is vital, but will not be displayed in the printed document. Next, if they have not named the columns, you will need to create a header at the top of each column, called it something. So you would have a column for their name, a column for their customer number, a column for their n name, a column for their city, and a column for their state. For example, this company had customer numbers, the company name, and the city and state as the additional information. One column will have the names of the attendees, and each additional column would have any additional information separated into individual columns. I had the company send me the list of the attendees in an Excel spreadsheet. You will only need to create these one time. Create these graphics in the top left of the document. Open a new InDesign document and place the graphics how you would like them, and to the specific size that you need. You will need to create your background graphics, logo, and anything else that will be repeated on each name badge. Instead of spending weeks on this, I was able to complete it in an hour and print it within a day.įirst, you will need to gather your project pieces.

INDESIGN DATA MERGE TUTORIAL FULL

I had a project where a company had a huge trade show, and I had to make around 2500 full color name badges for them. This tutorial will definitely come in handy for someone that has to create dozens, hundreds, or more of names badges, ID cards, business cards, or anything else that would have the same graphics, but different information on each one.

Indesign data merge tutorial