Does anyone have experience in Data merge/Produktion of 1000+ Produkt Data sheets?
So a little bit of background. I work as the only inhouse Grafik Designer at quite a large Company. I started last December and it's the first time this Company got someone for Marketing/Design. Before me they did everything over agencies. I basically have to build up everything from 0.
I know it's a big task, but I like the challenge and the leadership is quite supportive when I don't know stuff, but I'm required to find a lot of solutions on my own.
Now one of my tasks is to produce new Product sheets for B2B Marketing. There are about ~1500 different Products and they do not always have the same attributes and they have different lengths and quantitys. Sometimes new ones get added and old ones get changed.
Of course I could do everything by hand. But then I would be the only one who can edit and add Produkts. So now I'm looking for a solution for an automation process, that can be used by everyone without InDesign.
Requirements:
- it needs to be some kind of database which can be edited by sales.
-It needs to be able to fill into a neatly designed a4 page.
-not every page has the same attributes so hide/show for them
- the need to be exported as separate .pdf files in the best case named automatically
What the company has available:
-office suite for everyone
-creative cloud for me and some selective people.
So how I understand it is that big companies have custom solutions. And medium company's either use web based or InDesign/Figma Data merge solutions. We are definitely not big enough for some custom stuff. But the company is getting a new web page in a few months (from an Agency) so maybe there could be a web based solution.
What I have come up with so far (summery is with ai):
1. The Database (Excel): I set up an Excel sheet using Smart Tables so Sales can input data without breaking the structure. I use formulas to auto-generate absolute local file paths for images (using the @ column header trick so InDesign can map them).
The Data Formatting Hack: Since InDesign's native Data Merge is super rigid and doesn't handle empty fields or bulleted lists well, I use placeholder delimiters (like ###) in Excel to combine data (e.g., size variations) into single cells.
The InDesign Template: I export the Excel file as a Unicode .txt and map it to an InDesign template with placeholders.
GREP Styles for Layout: I rely heavily on GREP styles in InDesign to clean up the raw text. For example, GREP finds the ### from Excel and turns it into forced line breaks, or automatically applies bold font weights to specific attributes.
The Output: I run the merge to generate the pages. However, automatically splitting and naming 1500 individual PDFs based on their SKUs is a huge pain point with native InDesign.
This process has a lot of inefficiencys, and I'm trying to optimize it. I know there are some plugins for InDesign to make the process better but I need to know if they are worth it before I ask my company to buy a 1500€ plugin.
So my questions are now:
Has anyone been in a similar situation and has any recommendations or advice for me?
Has anyone worked with the plugins and knows if they are worth it?
Should I consider building making word templates? I am quite proficient in VBA Coding?
Should I consider a web based solution? I have 0 experience with that and would need a lot of outside help.
Thank you for reading this long as text. Any advice is appreciated :)