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I have about 100+ rows of content in a .csv and I'm bringing it into my Indesign template. That's working fine but I can't figure out how to integrate it with the Table of Contents.

Has anybody gotten this to work before?

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  • I'm not sure what you mean by "integrate with the TOC". Can you expand on that a bit? Feb 15, 2012 at 0:10
  • @AlanGilbertson Basically I want the TOC to dynamically populate with links to each of the 100+ pages. I thought I could just apply a "paragraph style" to the placeholder for my page's title in the template, but that doesn't seem to be working.
    – Ryan Grush
    Feb 15, 2012 at 0:33
  • You have to re-generate the TOC; it's not dynamic. If you can describe your template in more detail, I might be able to give you some suggestions on how to style the text so the TOC can be generated quickly. Feb 15, 2012 at 0:44
  • I figured that had to be the case. Does the TOC have to be made in the Merged Document one by one? Here's what the template looks like screencast.com/t/0i0UqCcC, I want to make the "Product Name" the bookmarks for each page.
    – Ryan Grush
    Feb 15, 2012 at 2:25

2 Answers 2

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It looks like you have merge fields set up, so I won't explain that part.

When you set up your merge, make sure that Product Name, the placeholder, has a paragraph style applied ON the master page (PrName, for example).

When the data merges, all those entries should then be styled PrName. You shouldn't have to style each one manually; it should generate a new document with each entry already styled.

Then set up a Table of Contents (under the Layout menu) using PrName as the paragraph style which InDesign finds for the TOC.

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If I'm understanding the situation correctly, your simplest approach would be to use InDesign's Book feature.

Set up your intro page and TOC as its own document, add your merged document to the book, then select the text frame with the TOC and use Layout > Update TOC.

As you iterate or update the data, you would simply replace the earlier version of your merged document with the new one.

For the future, if this will be a regular gig, consider setting up a tagged InDesign template and importing your data as XML. There's a learning curve, but being able to create an entire styled and formatted document with a single click does somewhat compensate for the pain. :)

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