InDesign data merge thousands of records (fast)

Merging large amounts of records into ONE big file in Adobe® InDesign® can be really time consuming, error prone and a challenge. The merge process of InDesign creates the merged document in the background and – therefore – renders it in memory. The larger this document gets, the more memory it consumes (up to gigabytes) and the slower the process becomes.

Lets put up an example:

You have a layout document with two pages and a data source with 2000 records. You want to have them in one document because you have a pagination in it that should count from 1 to 4000 (remember: 2000 records x 2 pages). With the standard merge you could do that, but it will take forever or quit or get stuck in the middle of the road without any committed reason.

Doing a split merge (e.g. 500 records per merge) will speed the things up (less memory consumption) but you would need to start a merge 4 times and then manually merge the document which takes also forever for 1000 pages (500 records x 2 pages) for each document. In addition, this approach would not keep track of continous pagination. Not the idea of automation, isn’t it?

MyDataMerge allows you – by default – to split documents in ONE run and automatically merge them into a book file which keeps up paginations. This will also take its time. But its the most effective you can get out of InDesigns data merge and it’s a start and forget until it’s done. And if you need to export to one PDF file at the end, MyDataMerge will do that for you, too.