• 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)
• Cannot contain line breaks inside of the data (just at the end of each data record)
• Each flied 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

Drag and drop your CSV file on the CSV icon or select a file by clicking the folder icon. Note: If you have Excel installed and running, you might see an Excel icon instead. You can still drop your csv file [1] on it and it will change to a CSV icon.

Then the settings will pop up. You must select the correct delimiter and encoding or the import will fail. The other options are optional:

Sanitize
With this option turned off, individual fields will be imported exactly like they are found in the .csv file. If you want these fields to be cleaned (surrounding double quotes stripped, characters unescaped, etc.) you can turn this option on.

Backslash as escape
This option allows you to import files where special characters are escaped with a backslash (the separator, newline etc.)

• Always expect long data. When preparing layouts for MyDataMerge, you have to add placeholders to text frames. Please make sure that text frames which contain placeholders are big enough to provide enough room for the data you want to merge in.
• Move unneeded stuff to master pages. Instead of keeping all items on the regular pages, move everything that’s does not need to be merged (like decoration, background images…) to the master page. For large databases, this will speed up the process a lot.
• Do not use styling options if every data record has the same styling. Apply styling in your layout document instead.
• Use locally installed fonts instead of auto downloading them from Adobe Cloud. Adobe Fonts can be installed locally as well in your Adobe Creative Cloud app. When loading them online, this can massively slow down the merge process or lead to errors.
• Scale images down. When merging thousands of data records its necessary to scale images down before the merge. No matter if the images are merged or part of the layout. This can save a lot of processing time.

Inline merge is a powerful tool if you want to merge inside a textframe and take advantage of flowing content. You cannot use this on an existing layout but on an empty textframe (Check requirements). After the merge is done you may copy the whole content of the textframe and insert it into your final layout.

Requirements

• Make sure you only have one page in your document, spreads turned off
• Make sure you only have one unique text frame on that page and nothing else

Inline merge content groups

• Prepare your document like mentioned above in „Setup layout for inline merge“
• Prepare a group with every placeholder you need, e.g. a business card:

Group everything and copy/paste it as anchored object into the single unique text frame:

Importing your layout is easy:

Open MyDataMerge, start a new project and drag and drop your .indd file on the INDD area [1] or select the file by clicking the folder button [2]

After adding a datasource you can import both files.

Most common issues that may arise

• If you have missing links or fonts, MyDataMerge will throw an error and ask you to fix this
• If you have no placeholders defined (surrounded by << >>), MyDataMerge will throw an error
• If you have auto-download fonts from Adobe Cloud enabled, MyDataMerge will throw an error – this is because InDesign loads these fonts asynchronously and doesn’t let developers (like us) check the loaded state of these fonts. You can bypass this issue by activating the fonts directly in the cloud (so they are always active)

If you want to export to Adobe InDesign files go to export > filetype and select the preferred filetype from the dropdown.

You can set a static filename in Export > Filetype > “Static filename” field.

With static filenames, every file will get the same name and a counting number will be attached. For example if you define static filename to be “mydatamerge” then files will be named like this:

• mydatamerge_1
• mydatamerge_2
• mydatamerge_3
• and so on

Please note that static filenames only allow a-z, 0-9, – and _ characters. Other characters will be removed or replaced.

Go to Export > Multiple Records and activate “MR in one text frame (inline merge)” [1]. If you cannot select it, please check again if your layout meets the requirements (in step “Setup layout for inline merge”).

GREP text actions allow you to search and replace specific strings matching custom search patterns with other strings or patterns AFTER the merge process is completed. They are applied to all documents generated.

Go to Export > Extras > GREP text

Here you can activate or deactivate your configured GREP text replacements. To edit them click on the pen icon of each row, to add new ones click on the gear icon in the bottom right. This will take you to the preferences where you can add new actions or delete existing ones (Note: Predefined actions cannot be deleted. They are flagged with [System] at the end of the name):

GREP text actions are stored locally on your machine. Only activated actions will be added to project files.