Once you've harvested those directory paths to identify the graphics in the Excel file, you have to do something else, you have to specially identify that column in a way that has meaning for the Data Merge function. It's a lot shorter, it's easier to police, to edit, to make sure that there aren't any problems with it, there's still some work involved, of course, in selecting that file name but you can see that it's a little easier to deal within this absolute path so I'm going to delete that absolute path and get rid of that.
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.
#EXCEL INDESIGN DATA MERGE WINDOWS#
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. InDesign's Data Merge feature also lets you incorporate images but there are couple of little tricks that you need to know.
0 kommentar(er)
