u/Audraigle

Data Merge on Facing Pages: Different layouts and sequential records per page (without editing Excel) ?

Hi everyone,

I’m struggling with a Data Merge issue in InDesign and I can't find a clean, native way to solve it...

Here is what I am trying to achieve :

I have a document with Facing Pages enabled.

The left page (Layout A) and the right page (Layout B) have different layouts with multiple independent text and image frames (no single text thread).

I need the merge to be sequential per page :

Left page takes Record 1, Right page takes Record 2, next Left page takes Record 3, next Right page takes Record 4, and so on.

My constraints:

I want to keep my Excel/CSV file agile as it is often updated. I do not want to edit the Excel structure (e.g., doubling columns into "Name_Left" and "Name_Right" on a single row is not an option for this workflow).

Since my layouts have many different, separate frames on each page, text threading/chaining across pages won't work for my design.

Is there a native workaround I missed, a specific script or something that allows InDesign to process one record per page sequentially across facing pages with different designs?

Thanks in advance for your help !

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u/Audraigle — 3 days ago