Look down one level and you'll find a links folder, inside that, you'll find this file, scooter_1.psd. 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. 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. 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. But generally speaking I've been pretty impressed.- InDesign's Data Merge feature also lets you incorporate images but there are couple of little tricks that you need to know. I wouldn't want to add more about the data merge process here as it's still in beta and it may change/improve before release. (I would stress that this is dummy data, not real names and passwords ) csv file I've been using to try it out, created in a text editor but the principle is the same as in Excel: Otherwise, as hinted at but not really explained in the video, you can include full paths, which could be quite cumbersome. If the data file is in the same directory as the images, then just the image name seems to work. The only major difference I can see is that you don't have to go through the shenanigans of typing an character in the header for linked images. csv or tab-delimited text file with a header row. I watched the video you referred and the process of setting up an Excel data file described there seems almost identical to what you do with Affinity Publisher. Please share any additional thoughts you might have. If you look in Youtube for this "Data merge Setting up a data file in Excel to merge with InDesign (720p)", what you describe sounds very similar to what will work in Publisher. And, to make it even more challenging, this process is only used for a couple weeks a year, so it's easy to forget the essential details. Time consuming to perform manually when there are over a hundred pics and 6 fields/ photo of text. Professionally, I create data in QGIS - an open source mapping app - and merge site visit data and photos. Having tutorials is essential to engaging users in making the switchover to these programs. Please share any additional thoughts you might thanks and yes, the video is about merging documents, not text and photos - an entirely different animal. I'll give it a try and report back! And yes, the video h_d linked is the one I reference in my previous post. You gave me enough fuel to get up the steep learning slope. I'm about to merge some site visit in stack of conservation restriction monitoring reports. It sounds a lot like setting up a CSV for importing text and photos into A-ID. Thanks for offering some specific steps to get me started.
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