Data Merge: One record per page

[CPD Bookings]

Hi,

As part of my job at work I create scientific abstract books that display research submitted by delegates attending the conferences we organise. So far I have manually inputted all information using copy and paste from excel files. The pages generally look like the image below. The abstracts are collated in excel first and I was hoping that it would be possible to data merge. The only examples of data merge i have seen are for multiple records per page however I would like each abstract (with the name, co-author, institution, title and abstract) to appear on separate pages. Is this possible and if so how?

[SJRiegel · Accepted solution]

InDesign can absolutely do one record per page - if fact that is its default until a user changes it.

All of your records would need to be lines on the same Excel sheet, and since your green headlines are of varying numbers of lines, for best results you would need to put the placeholder for that header and and the placeholder for the body text into the same text box on the page.

[CPD Bookings]

Fantastic, thank you, worked fine. One issue i am having is that if there is a paragraph break within the Excel sheet, when you come to merge the document it pushes each line on to a new page. Other than using find/change, is there something you can get InDesign to do prior tot he merge to ignore the breaks?

[SJRiegel]

I have not found any way to get InDesign to ignore line breaks from Excel - My only fix was to go into Excel and get rid of the breaks. 

If you need them to be there in your final document, you can replace the in Excel with some sort of placeholder character that is not used elsewhere in your document, and then use find/replace to put them back after the merge.

[CPD Bookings]

Ok, sounds reasonable, thank you very much for your help.

[Colin Flashman]

There is a macro that can be used in Excel to fix line breaks - I use this on my Mac to fix databases where line breaks are present.

Try adding the following macro to an Excel document and then run the macro from the macro sub-menu:

Sub RemoveCarriageReturns()
    Dim MyRange As Range
    Application.ScreenUpdating = False
    Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual
    For Each MyRange In ActiveSheet.UsedRange
        If 0 < InStr(MyRange, Chr(13)) Then
            MyRange = Replace(MyRange, Chr(13), ", ")
        End If
    Next
    Application.ScreenUpdating = True
    Application.Calculation = xlCalculationAutomatic
End Sub

This will replace "soft returns" with a comma and a space.

[whitneyh92144274]

I cannot seem to get one record per pages that are facing? I end up with a spread of the same record on both pages?

[SJRiegel]

Your starting document should have only one document page with one set of placeholders. Data Merge will generate the correct number of pages based on the number of records you are merging.  

You may need to change your document to facing pages after the merge is complete.