![]() ![]() It’s easier if you only want to merge from Contacts.Īpple’s revived mail merge in Pages 12.1 is utter bliss, both on its own and by comparison to Word and Swift Publisher. But despite the effort BeLight put into the feature, I found it more painful than Word to use when merging from spreadsheet data. To its credit, BeLight gave users a free license to Swift Publisher, its desktop publishing software, which has some rudimentary tools for mail merge. I used BeLight’s Labels & Addresses app for years, but the company opted not to upgrade it to 64-bit compatibility, so it died with macOS 10.15 Catalina. ![]() (Avery is a major producer of printable labels in all varieties.) What I remember as a quick set of clicks and formatting in the 1990s and 2000s took hours of fiddling to produce something that still didn’t look exactly like I wanted. I recently wrestled with Word to produce shipping labels for a Kickstarter project’s rewards, and every step was painful, despite its built-in templates for Avery labels. Microsoft Word has always had mail merge, but it’s far more complicated than the last time I used it. It’s commonly used to generate form letters, address labels, and name tags. A concept dating back at least four decades, mail merge lets you insert placeholders in a template document that are replaced with entries in a column of data in a spreadsheet or similar tabular format. ![]() Apple removed the feature from the iWork suite as part of the fundamental rewrite of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote in 2013. #1652: OS updates, DPReview shuttered, LucidLink cloud storageĪfter nearly a decade, Apple has finally brought mail merge back to Pages.#1653: Apple Music Classical review, Authory service for writers, WWDC 2023 dates announced.1654: Urgent OS security updates, upgrading to macOS 13 Ventura, using smart speakers while temporarily blind.#1655: 33 years of TidBITS, Twitter train wreck, tvOS 16.4.1, Apple Card Savings, Steve Jobs ebook.#1656: Passcode thieves lock iCloud accounts, the apps Adam uses, iPhoto and Aperture library conversion in Ventura.Now all my text frames expand from the top right to fit all the text for each data field on the one line without spilling over to the next. In this case, I chose to resize from the top right corner, and selected the option for “No Line Breaks.” Select the text frame with the Address Fields, and then you can go to Object > Text Frame Options. InDesign has a great feature to combat this, which was introduced in CS6: Auto-Size. ![]() So I need to come up with a solution that fixes the overset text problem and keeps each data field on one line. In this case, the overset happened because my text frame was not large enough. If there is overset text, each example is noted. When you export to PDF, InDesign creates a report. Usually your Data Merge will look something like this: InDesign will inform you of overset text, but only after the merge is complete!įrom the flyout menu in the Data Merge panel select “Export to PDF.” Problems like these can be hard to notice, especially when you’re working with a database of 10,000 addresses! It would be very difficult and time consuming to proof the output and fix any mistakes you find. But it’s missing because the text frame is overset.Īnd in this example, the text “Andrew Young International Boulevard” should appear on one line, not two. You can see the problem in the screenshot below – the text “United States of America” should appear at the bottom of the address. Recently, I came across a trick that I thought was worth sharing. My particular problem was that the text frame wasn’t big enough for a long field in my data merge. Fortunately, there are plenty of good data merge tips here at InDesignSecrets and at. Using InDesign’s Data Merge features can be tricky at times. ![]()
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