Best practices

.xlsx (Microsoft Excel)

• Avoid „combining cells“ – each data content has to be in its own data cell
• Format cells as text
• If you like to use MyDataMerge’s number formatting, format the cells as „number“ – other formats may cause unintended behavior
• Colors, font size and other styling information will not be imported
• Formulas and other logic operations will not be imported – just the text content
• Line breaks will be imported/replaced as space character by default (you can change this in the import preferences)

.csv

• Must contain more than one data column/title (you can disable this behavior in the import preferences if you have a csv with one column only)
• May not contain line breaks inside of the data (just at the end of each data record)
• Has to be separated by one of the following characters: semicolon, comma, tab or vertical bar
• Has to be encoded as MacOS Roman, UTF-8 (recommended), UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, UTF-32BE or UTF-32LE

Image data

If your database contains pathes to images, you are very determinate on where you can move them. It’s better to only use the actual image name inside your datasource instead of the whole path.  MyDataMerge allows you to set that path later, so you are more flexible in moving your data around.

So instead of:
/user1/desktop/myImage.jpg

it’s better to use
myImage.jpg

But if you have an image with a path you can tell MyDataMerge to trim it. This allows you – even if the wrong path is in the datasource – to point MyDataMerge to a custom folder with all of your images. Find these options in the settings of a datasource element from an image replacement.

If your database contains one or more image columns and you’d like to use autolink then have a look at the import preferences where you can define image data titles for autolink.

QR-Code data

QR-Codes will be generated by using and combining existing data columns. You don’t need a separate data column in your data source.