InDesign Data Merge Business Cards (5-minute Video)

Use data merge to increase efficiency and drastically speed up your workflow.
This example uses Excel, but you can use another free spreadsheet software such as Open Office or Google Spreadsheets to save your data in a .csv format. Or you can use a text editor and add a comma after each value and a break between lines.
#InDesign #DataMerge #Tutorial

[@FabrizioLazzeretti]

Straight and simple explanation. Thanks for sharing.

[@ogmrbiotech]

Very thorough treatment with great detail - thanks!

[@suliandrea9979]

Still useful, thank You so much!

[@byersmedia]

first video i found that was easy to follow and made sense. Course there might be others out there, but i stopped looking.
Another thing you might want to mention in the next one is that you should not try this with an existing indesign file, my cvs file kept getting an error. and it had to do with using an existing file but a different cvs that was not the same as the other. a new indesign file with the new cvs file worked like a charm, following your instructions. thank you!!

[@ashleycam3ron]

Thanks for the helpful feedback! I haven't used this method enough to notice the issue you found.

[@astyag8627]

Cool stuff! Thank you for the thorough video.

[@skate3sets]

Thanks!

[@Matt-oj5xc]

Excellent video - thank you. If you were to have a front & back design, would the front be Master A, and the back be Master B with the data going against the master with the customizable data? Also, what export do you find to work best with InDesign for sending to print? PDF?

[@ashleycam3ron]

+Matt Shaver Great questions. I haven't tried what you're asking with the front-back, but what you mentioned seems valid to try. As for printing, I save a pdf with .125" bleed and crop marks at high quality. I save those settings as a preset for quicker exporting in the future.

[@ashleycam3ron]

+Matt Shaver I've been re-reading your question.. Are you keeping 1 side unchanged or do both have variable data? I'd keep the master pages separate for front & back

[@Matt-oj5xc]

Correct- the front page is static (company logo) then the back page has all of the details (variable data). I'm currently testing the setup after converting one large text block to individual text areas with the two master pages.

[@Matt-oj5xc]

Also - thank you for the quick reply!

[@ashleycam3ron]

Matt Shaver You're welcome! Let me know how this goes. I'm newer to using data merge, but I'm hoping to use it on my next business card project which would likely be 2-sided as yours is.

[@winkipinky]

Thanks!