#Adobe indesign data merge tutorial plus#

What’s great is that you can use the same data from the Data Merge panel multiple times in a document. (I used a nested style to apply them automatically.) Of course, it doesn’t look right at all until I turn on the Preview checkbox in the Data Merge panel, which replaces the proxies (like >) with the real data. And finally I assign different colors to each of the variables.

Next I select the text and apply the Chartwell font and the Pie style, then increase the size.

#Adobe indesign data merge tutorial plus#

I’ll make a text frame and click the first variable in the panel, then type a plus sign, then the second variable, then a plus sign, and so on: Now I can select that as my Data Source in the Data Merge panel. Here’s the example spreadsheet I’m working with (I just chose A, B, C, D as the column headers so I’d have something to work with in data merge normally you’d use something more descriptive): Colin Flashman wrote up an amazing-but-very-complex-solution for this a while back, but it occurred to me that Colin probably didn’t have the Chartwell font! Chartwell makes this whole thing far easier. As you can see in this earlier article about it, it’s really quite astonishing.īut someone recently asked me about how one might create a lot of different charts based on data in a spreadsheet or database, and it occurred to me that the Data Merge feature could do the trick. That is, you type something like 20+30+50, apply the font, and violà, you have a chart. But one of the coolest ways to make charts in InDesign is with the Chartwell font.Ĭhartwell lets you make a number of different types of charts - pie graphs, bars, lines, etc. Others use a script such as Claquos to do it. Most people try to import charts made in Excel or another program into InDesign. Charts are among the hardest visual effects to create well in InDesign.