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As I evaluate Publisher, one of the necessary key features is data merge. InDesign allows photos and captions from a CSV to merged into a document. When I have hundreds of photos with captions in a report, this saves hours of work. Does Publisher have a similar feature or do you have plans to add this feature?

 

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No data merge in Publisher and as far as I have read no real plan to add it soon though I am sure it is on their list of things to add as it has been requested more then a few times. I would do serious tests with the Publisher beta if you are looking to switch. In my opinion Publisher is not ready to replace Indesign for real pro work. The way it handles PDF's and the lack of features like data merging have me keep it around to test things with but never use on live jobs. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I will wait to and see what they do about creating data merge feature for publisher. Really looking to merge variable data into work already created in designer with even using a bar code generator. Anybody have any suggestions of this idea while using affinity? 

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  • 4 months later...
On 6/20/2020 at 2:10 PM, rikk said:

I will wait to and see what they do about creating data merge feature for publisher. Really looking to merge variable data into work already created in designer with even using a bar code generator. Anybody have any suggestions of this idea while using affinity? 

Thanks WhiteX and will check into it!

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11 hours ago, WhiteX said:

If you missed it somehow, Data Merge is available in the latest betas.

Thanks for the update and I checked the latest tutorial videos regarding data merge. I seem to missing the details. Specifically, where would I look to find more information about muring phots and data from a csv into a publisher document? (As I mentioned in a previous post, I need to merge photos and spreadsheet/csv data into a publication for hundred of photos. Merging pages from other publisher documents is NOT what's needed. )

Thanks!

 

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@giaco51 I didn't see those videos. Where are they? I made some tests for myself, experimenting with the Data Merge feature, and all works well on Windows. I used a single .xlsx file, and a simple product catalog layout, with prices, product names, discount values and a photo for the products. I suppose the text data merge function works well for you. For the images you need to have the source path for the images in the spreadsheet document. You need to add an image frame into your design on the existing Data Merge Layout. Select your image frame, then double click the image path field on the fields panel (View>Studio>Fields).

Is this what you're looking for or something else?

Branding, Identity Design, UI/UX Design.    |    https://whitex.design

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If this is the video you're referring to, @giaco51 it's not about the new data merge feature in Affinity Publisher beta: it's specifically about merging separate Publisher documents. As far as I'm aware there are no official tutorials yet about how to use data merge - people are picking it up as they go along...

Affinity Photo 2.0.3,  Affinity Designer 2.0.3, Affinity Publisher 2.0.3, Mac OSX 13, 2018 MacBook Pro 15" Intel.

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Thanks @WhiteX for offering some specific steps to get me started. It sounds a lot like setting up a CSV for importing text and photos into A-ID. I'm about to merge some site visit in stack of conservation restriction monitoring reports. You gave me enough fuel to get up the steep learning slope. 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.

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. Please share any additional thoughts you might have.

@H_d, thanks and yes, the video is about merging documents, not text and photos - an entirely different animal. Having tutorials is essential to engaging users in making the switchover to these programs. Professionally, I create data in QGIS - an open source mapping app - and merge site visit data and photos. Time consuming to perform manually when there are over a hundred pics and 6 fields/ photo of text. 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.

Thanks for the support!

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3 hours ago, giaco51 said:

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. Please share any additional thoughts you might have.

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. It requires a .csv or tab-delimited text file with a header row. 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. If the data file is in the same directory as the images, then just the image name seems to work. Otherwise, as hinted at but not really explained in the video, you can include full paths, which could be quite cumbersome.

This is a grab of a dummy .csv file I've been using to try it out, created in a text editor but the principle is the same as in Excel:

1704170357_Screenshot2020-11-08at15_05_10.thumb.png.19787541eaf36b9d24bad06e68087d60.png

(I would stress that this is dummy data, not real names and passwords 9_9)

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. But generally speaking I've been pretty impressed.

Affinity Photo 2.0.3,  Affinity Designer 2.0.3, Affinity Publisher 2.0.3, Mac OSX 13, 2018 MacBook Pro 15" Intel.

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The link to the beta forum for Affinity Publisher is in my previous post, but here it is again. Don't visit any dubious websites! Click on the forum that corresponds to your OS and there are download links in the official Affinity posts. Cheers, H

Affinity Photo 2.0.3,  Affinity Designer 2.0.3, Affinity Publisher 2.0.3, Mac OSX 13, 2018 MacBook Pro 15" Intel.

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6 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

It can also be a table of an Excel file

I tried that without success - I'll give it another go. But generally it's pretty flexible - even without Excel (like me) you could do something similar with Numbers and export as .CSV/.TSV.

Affinity Photo 2.0.3,  Affinity Designer 2.0.3, Affinity Publisher 2.0.3, Mac OSX 13, 2018 MacBook Pro 15" Intel.

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  • 2 weeks later...

is this feature available in 1.9?

Will data merge allow me to have different translations of content?

For instance, I made a book in English which also has an equivalent in Spanish. And it will also be translated in more languages.

Copying and pasting is too tedious as this is a 100 pages book.

If data merge doesn't work for this does anyone know how to accomplish the above?

Thanks

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The data merge feature, available and testable in Affinity Publisher 1.9 beta, lets you set up a data merge layout based on the headers of columns in an Excel spreadsheet, or the first row of a csv/tsv text file:

127691360_Screenshot2020-11-18at17_10_40.thumb.png.367cb545035e5bb2bd9531c511b7c853.png

You then generate a data merge which pulls all the individual records from the spreadsheet/csv/tsv into a new document based on the size and layout of your original, including images if you specify a filename or path, and adding as many pages as required:

855837076_Screenshot2020-11-18at17_12_38.png.8cff13b4aa1e6b27966c12ce674fd54d.png

Its main purpose is to create things like mail-outs, personalised stationery (eg business cards), labels etc

I may be missing something but I don't really see how it could be applied to producing separate books in the way you describe..

Unless you've planned your original book very carefully, and prepared the text as flows, tagged in some way so you can search and replace to apply styles to the translated text, then I think a certain amount of copying and pasting is almost inevitable.

Cheers,

H

 

 

Affinity Photo 2.0.3,  Affinity Designer 2.0.3, Affinity Publisher 2.0.3, Mac OSX 13, 2018 MacBook Pro 15" Intel.

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hi @h_d

thank you for your reply.

My book is a manual which has bullets, two or three headers, paragraph, etc in the same page. In ID you can tag stuff and export it in a text document which you can feed back to ID.

Is there an equivalent? I feel the solution you suggested doesn't work with my manual and its many paragraph and character styles within a page.

Thanks

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2 minutes ago, gegagome said:

Is there an equivalent?

 No, as far as I'm aware there's no way of exporting the equivalent of an IDML file from Affinity Publisher.

Affinity Photo 2.0.3,  Affinity Designer 2.0.3, Affinity Publisher 2.0.3, Mac OSX 13, 2018 MacBook Pro 15" Intel.

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@h_d

just to clarify ID exports a txt file heavily tagged (which you have to tag yourself, not sure if there is an automatic tag function), enclosing text. You then replace this text file with the new one (or in my case translation) and feed it back into ID.

This is one of the things I want Publisher to have as I often deal with publications in different languages. I find myself ridiculously copying and pasting text over from textedit to Publisher, either revised text or translations.

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1 hour ago, polochon said:

Anyone know how to get a table of contents sorted alphabetically after data merge?

Table of Contents, or Index?

Isn't the ToC always in page number order?

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
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I bought Publisher just to try out the data merge and having a difficult time understanding how it works. How do I insert a data field? If you view the screenshot, it tells me to double-click field name to insert, but nothing happens when I do. Then at the bottom, I see instructions to "Drag to place a new Merge Node". What am I suppose to drag?

Hopefully someone can provide some guidance here. If needed, I'm on a Mac.

Thanks in advance.

data-merge.jpg

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