Hundreds of thousands of lines of data

[andreaw18072001]

I am working on a music catalog in InDesign CC2015/2017 (I'm not sold on 2017 yet so I'll probably stick with 2015 for this) where I am given an Excel sheet with hundreds of thousands of songs/artist/album info and tables seem to have a limit of how many rows you can have. Is there an easier way to lay this info out in a table format so that I don't have to keep making new tables when I hit the limit?

[Laubender]

andreaw18072001 wrote:

… Is there an easier way to lay this info out in a table format so that I don't have to keep making new tables when I hit the limit?

No.

Not for expanding the limit on the number of rows, I think.

If I recall that right, the limit for an InDesign table is 200 columns and 10,000 rows.

For pushing up the number of columns there would be a workaround*.

And even if you'll find a way be aware, that you are in "uncharted" land:

* Once I did a table with 202 columns. All went fine until I saved the document as IDML, opened the IDML with the same version of InDesign and the table was missing.

Regards,
Uwe

[MW Design]

You likely would have better success using a data merge plugin and avoiding tables altogether.

I use XData in QXP and while I haven't tried such a large data amount, it likely would work just fine. The same plugin for ID works the same. Em Software's plugin trial cannot do more than 50 records, I think. But likely they can test with your file and let you know how well it worked. I would offer the same thing if you could share the file privately.

Mike

[andreaw18072001]

so if there are thousands of lines of data, do you have to create field placeholders for every line of info?

[SJRiegel]

Just one placeholder for each column of data. Design one record, and InDesign does the layout based the values you enter for vertical and horizontal space between records.

[andreaw18072001]

It only flows in the first line of data and then stops. What am I doing wrong?

[MW Design]

Yeah, what SJR wrote.

Are you trying the InData product or using ID's in-built data merge? If trying InData and you need help with the expression, it would be helpful to have the data headers from the CSV file.

Mike

[andreaw18072001]

I am using InDesign's built in data merge. Do I have to use tables or can I use tabs and returns? Right now I am using tabs and returns but only the first line of data is coming in. I have attached a portion of my .txt file as well as what shows up in my InDesign file.

[MW Design]

I cannot tell what it up with your merge file per se from the screen shot. A note or two. I use no punctuation in the data headers and no parentheses. I (almost) always use a tab delimited file. And unless I need a certain format, I generally use a UTF-8 type of data file.

For placing the placeholders, yes, tabs and returns. There can only be one set of placeholders in a single frame. I place the text frame for the placeholders on a regular page (not a master page).

Mike

[Peter Kahrel]

Have you tried placing the xsl file as unformatted tabbed text? That must be the quickest way to place it, and after placement it should be the quickest to process. Those huge tables make an InDesign document sluggish. Plain text is much easier to process.

Peter

[MW Design]

Another option from using a plug-in (they are so much better than ID's native merge) is to break the file into smaller chunks and use chapters for the tables you seem to want to use.

[didiermazier]

I used InData with more than 35 000 records without any problem