Data Merge in a magazine page

I agree fully with Dave Nagel in his article "Data Merge in Adobe InDesign CS: Creating multiple-record layouts for catalogs and buyer's guides" in Digital Media Designer that the PageMaker plugin for InDesign is a seriously overlooked feature.

In part this may be because it was originally part of PageMaker 7, the version of PageMaker which came out after InDesign was announced and which had little else to offer except some updated filters and a halfhearted attempt to make it work with OSX in Classic mode and with Windows XP.

The Data Merge feature was really quite useful and I added a chapter to my book Publication Production using PageMaker on how it could form the basis of a rudimentary ad booking system for small publications.

In Dave's article he shows how it can be used to produce a buyer's guide page in a magazine which can be almost instantly updated from a spreadsheet file. No longer does the designer or typesetter have to search for those items which have changed and risk mistyping a phone number or a name.

For upmarket publications there may be better (and more expensive) ways of doing this, but for the smaller magazine, newspaper or book where entries need to be updated instantly and cheaply it is a real money saver.