Several weeks ago, we had a local tweet-up where I met some awesome people. This post is largely for Jeff, another graphic designer who I met that night and now follow on twitter, and for whomever is interested in learning more about InDesign.

I believe I mentioned something about the fact that you can use Data Merge in InDesign. I have yet to use the feature on consistent basis. My projects aren't necessarily repetitive in that nature so I don't use it that much. I used it recently for a project where we needed hundreds of images to all look the same. I made a template with text place holders, and imported my excel file. The place holders were replaced with the actual "fields" attached to a column in Microsoft Excel. Pressed play and Data Merge created a new document according to the template with all the info in the corresponding fields.

For more info, go to the theindesigner.com. Michael Murphy has a good instructional video that's relatively short and quite easy to follow. Video podcast: http://www.theindesigner.com/blog/episode-43-data-merge-video

Also, an audio podcast on the same topic: http://www.theindesigner.com/blog/episode-7-the-urge-to-merge