3 Replies Latest reply: May 27, 2009 12:22 PM by mikejasinski RSS

    Data merge skipping one cell

    mikejasinski Community Member

      Hello, having a problem in IDCS4 where data merge is skipping a cell in the EXCEL tab-del .txt file. i've saved both documents different ways (the txt through word, text edit, excel, etc.) done inx and save as with the id file. I'm doing business cards and its skipping one of the "titles", going into the next row - so everybody after that has the wrong title. i've tried adding a fake line or 2 with crap data to get it to reset, ive duplicated the column, but those doesnt work. theres no funky characters in that cell, i've rearranged everything and it always skips the second rows "titles" cell. saved as INX to IDCS3 and it works perfectly - using the same .txt file. any ideas? thanks in advance.

       

      ok done some more testing

      if i have the title seperated into another text box, it works correctly, while the other one still doesn't - everything is styled the same, and i have no options checked in the merge prefs.

        • 1. Re: Data merge skipping one cell
          macinbytes Community Member

          I'll hop on the obvioius guess and ask "Does that title have a comma in it?"

           

          When building data merge CSV files I make a textbox on the pasteboard, paste all of the data out of excel, do a find for the comma character and replace it with a word I know isn't used in my file "marklar" from south park, then replace the tabs with commas and paste that into a plain text editor, save that out as CSV. In any case I suggest when working with data merge to never use CSV as your working editing file as Excel has a tendency to format cells for no apparent reason when opening CSV. Short of having manual calculation set and knowing that everyone who touches the files also does there is room to be burned.

           

          Edit: Mac 2008 Excel is what I have.

          • 2. Re: Data merge skipping one cell
            mikejasinski Community Member

            nope, no commas in the file, or in that skipped cell.

             

            when i have the title in a text box by itself it works fine.

             

            i did convert everything to plain text, before importing so it shouldn't have any excel issues...

            • 3. Re: Data merge skipping one cell
              mikejasinski Community Member

              i'll try it the CSV format and see what happens