Feature request: pre-chain textboxes on master pages

[cahueya]

Hi, I played around with the latest version of Publisher yesterday and used it to create a Nametag-PDF with 250 participants of an event.

The way I got to what I need (Data Merge would have been an option if available) was to create a Master Page with 10 textboxes that are chained to each other, create pages out of those and chain the last box of a page to first of the next.

After having those 250 boxes chained, I could copy+paste the ist of name, separated by spaces into that array and adjust.

 

Now there are two features I've found would make that very easy:

1. Allow adjusting of textbox on the page. This worked until version .206 but this one had a lot of crashes. Since version .211 the boxes are locked in size, but maybe I am just too dumb to find how to unlock them.

 

2. Every time any adjustment to the master pages is applied to the pages, they lose the chained connections to their individual "next page". So I thougt: If I could tell the master page to link that last text box to the equivalent of the first textbox on the next iteration of that page - that would make things super easy!

 

I think, independently of if you are making a book or play cards or whatever - concatenating the boxes such that every created page has its links already would speed that up a lot!

I even do think that you could work around a lot of scenarios for Data Merge like that.

 

Thanks!

 

 

Ok, I just found the feature "autoflow". I haven't played with it yet, but if it does what I wished for, please delete this post. Thanks :-) You do great work!

 

 

[fde101]

8 hours ago, cahueya said:

"autoflow". I haven't played with it yet, but if it does what I wished for,

It is at best a partial solution to the problem, and not by any means as complete as it should be... but it's a fair start anyway.