[Implemented] Data merge

[ABU]

+1

I need it!

Please consider the simplicity of MS-Publisher and provide a more careful solution for left/right pages layout, in particular when the first page must be on the right side.

[petrpastor]

Hi all.

It has been a half a year since the very important feature to have variable feeld fed from external data source (also called mail merge) has been requested by huge amount of users. I appreciate hard work of Serif team on continuous improvement and bug fixes of affinity range. I would like to ask if the data merge is going to be implemented in the next beta version after 249. My personal oppinion is that this feature is way more important that grep search function.

Thanks

-pp-

[Michail]

27 minutes ago, petrpastor said:

My personal oppinion is that this feature is way more important that grep search function.

Some say this, others say that

[figety]

I found myself looking for "data-merge" today and I was told to use InDesign...  I didn't know you can do "data-merge" with InDesign...    I choose Affinity Publisher to do all my layout designs because it's very intuitive...  I never read the manual and I seem to be a Pro : )  At least I think so...   I second the inclusion of data-merge feature into Affinity Publisher...    This feature will help me tremendously with my work...

[dkibui]

Up voting data merge here. It is a must have. I use it to populate certificates every other week for a training company I work with.

[Scarash]

+1 for Data merge.

I would add "User profiles" like PagePlus provides and is essential to adapt the same document to multiple locations.

[Dave Harris]

On 2/23/2019 at 7:18 AM, petrpastor said:

Hi all.

It has been a half a year since the very important feature to have variable feeld fed from external data source (also called mail merge) has been requested by huge amount of users. I appreciate hard work of Serif team on continuous improvement and bug fixes of affinity range. I would like to ask if the data merge is going to be implemented in the next beta version after 249. My personal oppinion is that this feature is way more important that grep search function.

Thanks

-pp-

It's also a lot harder to implement. I'm afraid it's unlikely to make 1.7 at all, never mind the next beta.

[osipov11789]

Good day! It would be nice to add the auto-fill pages feature to affinity publisher when importing files from word

[osipov11789]

Merging of data is also possible using layers that are in this program

[mswift]

1 hour ago, osipov11789 said:

Merging of data is also possible using layers that are in this program

Please show us how you merge data with layers.

[ernie-f]

 

4 hours ago, mswift said:

Please show us how you merge data with layers.

I'd like to know that too. Best with 400 addresses from a csv-file.

[Patrick Connor]

5 hours ago, mswift said:

7 hours ago, osipov11789 said:

Merging of data is also possible using layers that are in this program

Please show us how you merge data with layers.

Yeah, Im all ears 

[carl123]

Someone posted a clever way to use a master page and the text Autoflow function to do a simple data merge not too long ago (which works quite well) but I cant find the thread now. 

[MEB]

carl123,
You're probably talking about this post from MikeW maybe?

[carl123]

1 minute ago, MEB said:

carl123,
You're probably talking about this post from MikeW maybe?

Yes, that is the one

[MikeW]

17 minutes ago, carl123 said:

Yes, that is the one

Yes, but it only works well for such a design as certificates.

Other than say address labels (but even those can be done this way), one can merge in Word/LibreWriter and export as RTF (or copy/paste) to import into APub.

[fde101]

43 minutes ago, MikeW said:

one can merge in Word/LibreWriter and export as RTF (or copy/paste) to import into APub

Hmm, there is an interesting approach...  I might have to try that with Nisus Writer Pro at some point (Mac-only I believe, but that program does support a merge feature and uses RTF as its native file format...)

[mswift]

6 hours ago, carl123 said:

Yes, that is the one

Interesting, I will also try it though pretty much all my data merge needs are for things like multi page catalogues, including images.

[Doug Thomson]

It's a biggie for me as well. It needs to as good and hopefully better than inDesign's implementation. 

Edited March 8, 2019 by Doug Thomson

[Calibinder]

Yes another vote for data merge and let's do it right with also being able to link to a XML file.

Why?

Online web product catalog that could be exported as a XML file, Indesign had something like this but I gave up on Adobe. I produced many catalogs in PagePlus using the data merge but it got tedious re-importing csv files to make price changes. And as my graphic design brethren on this forum know the client is going to make changes all the way up until the final final draft that goes to print and even sometimes after the files have been sent to the printer, so we as graphic designers need software that allows us to make refreshes instantly. 

So I begged and pleaded to deaf ears at Serif to add linked XML support so that all I would need to do is re generate a XML file from the website database and then refresh the linked resource in PagePlus. So moral of the story I stopped making catalogs which was going pretty good and I wanted to expanded it.

 

Thank You

[fde101]

12 hours ago, Calibinder said:

all I would need to do is re generate a XML file from the website database

Why wouldn't you just do the merge against the database and cut out the "middleman"?

Not that XML would be a bad format to support as well but a database would be even better for this and you could go straight to the source.

[vonBusing]

1 hour ago, fde101 said:

Why wouldn't you just do the merge against the database and cut out the "middleman"?

Not that XML would be a bad format to support as well but a database would be even better for this and you could go straight to the source.

I can imagine that connecting to a database is a slightly more complicated task than parsing a text-based file. Databases, and protocols to connect to them, comes in quite many flavours. One may also need to fetch data in several tables based on relations. It could still be more rational to let a more dedicated/specialised tool do the compilation to a file and upload that data to Publisher from the file.

As an alternative to XML, I could see JSON as a well-established format when compiling not strictly tabular data. In my opinion, it is slightly more readable than XML, even for human eyes.

[Twenty4C]

+1 again for a data merge.

when Affinity Publisher becomes commercially available  a data merge would be an indispensable feature !

 

Anyways, keep up the good work! 
Loving you products.

[figety]

There is a new beta to download today and the first thing I think of is Data-Merge...

I look for this feature every month when I download a new beta version of Publisher...

Please make it happen...  and include Data-Merge

[dominik]

5 hours ago, figety said:

There is a new beta to download today and the first thing I think of is Data-Merge...

Hi @figety,

where did you see the new version? Which number?

d.