It isn't a show stopper but you know what, I'm in my text editor, I might as well clean things up here. Now, notice something else about this, at the end of the text, there are these two lines of commas with nothing in between 'em and what that represents is a bunch of empty records and that means that I'm going to end with two blank pages in my exported file using Data Merge. So again, if you're working along, make sure that you've picked the right one.
#Data merge indesign 2021 mac#
Windows uses back slashes and the Mac uses forward slashes. On a Mac, it's /Links which means, go down one level, look in the Links folder slash go inside the Links folder and there's your file. Now here, you can see the columns are broken apart by commas, that's why it's called Comma Separated Values and here's how the links are represented, how the link directory path is represented. Now, here's the Mac file, let's take a look at the CSV files I've provided for you here in the text editor so you can see the difference between the Mac version and the Windows version. Let's take a look at the CSV files I've provided for you in a text editor so that you can see the difference in them. So, make sure you pick the right one if you're working along in the exercise. By the way, I made two versions for you, one for Windows and a Mac version. Once I've saved the Excel file, the CSV, it's ready to use in InDesign. That's really easy, you just choose File, Save As, and then choose Comma Separated Values for your file format. Now, InDesign can't digest this Excel file directly in the Data Merge function, I have to save it as a CSV file.
![data merge indesign 2021 data merge indesign 2021](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KA2EZfGLIyw/maxresdefault.jpg)
So, what I can do is what's called escaping, in other words, it's a way to the say to Excel, "No, no, don't invoke that special function, "I just need a plain old at sign", and to do that, I just type an apostrophe in front of that at sign. Excel squawks at me and the reason is that the at sign serves a special function in Excel and this is what this just doesn't seem right to me but I need that at sign for my Data Merge function. The title needs to be the at sign and word, image, just no space in between, ah, but watch what happens when I try to make that entry. Once you've harvested those directory paths to identify the graphics in the Excel file, you have to do something else, you have to specially identify that column in a way that has meaning for the Data Merge function. It's a lot shorter, it's easier to police, to edit, to make sure that there aren't any problems with it, there's still some work involved, of course, in selecting that file name but you can see that it's a little easier to deal within this absolute path so I'm going to delete that absolute path and get rid of that. Look down one level and you'll find a links folder, inside that, you'll find this file, scooter_1.psd.
![data merge indesign 2021 data merge indesign 2021](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ylw6_6keG30/maxresdefault.jpg)
Remember, here's my absolute path, here are my relative paths, and what this notation here really means is InDesign. I do have to get each path separately but it's a much shorter path. Here, my InDesign file is in the same folder as a Links folder that contains all of the images that I'm going to use in Data Merge. If possible, setup your links as a relative directory path. Well, that's Windows proprietary personalization solutions start to become much more appealing but here's a tip. This is doable, it's tedious, but for a small project, you could use this, but you can imagine what fun this would be if you had 200 graphics that were intended to be used as variable content. This is what's called an absolute path, it starts at the very beginning of the hierarchy and shows you the complete path.
![data merge indesign 2021 data merge indesign 2021](https://mfost.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Indesign-layout-768x510.png)
Now, you can see that's a really long-winded path. On either platform, once you've copied the directory path, switch back to Excel, click in the appropriate cell and then paste that directory path. Select the file name, hold down the Shift key while you right click for file and then a context menu appears and from that, you choose Copy as Path. On Windows, it's very similar, slight difference. But this, at least, gets you off to a good start so I can copy that and then I can use it back in Excel. Now, notice that it just goes up so far as the containing folder, Links.
![data merge indesign 2021 data merge indesign 2021](https://cdn.onemorething.nl/uploads/hm_bbpui/reply/3258674/7mf9bm7n1w87xmav32e9u6nhcjqqkjs7.png)
On the Mac, just select the file, right click, and then choose Get Info, and in the Get Info dialog, there it is. So, how do you find the directory path for an image? Well, let me show you. You can see in the columns, firstname, lastname, year, brand, model and so forth, and then this last column, is how I have to represent directory path to the Data Merge feature so that it can find the images that I want to use. First, let's take a look at the source excel file that I'm going to use. InDesign's Data Merge feature also lets you incorporate images but there are couple of little tricks that you need to know.