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I have an InDesign document which is filled from the data in a CSv using data mrege. The csv has columns for name, phone, email etc, but some of the data in the ccsv isn't filled in as it is not all necessarry so when InDesign gets to that record it leaves it blank. So far so good, but I have my document setup like this:

Name: Bob

Phone: 01234567890

Email: bob @ email .com

When a field is missing I end up with just a blank record and I want the data merge or a script to just hide that all together if it's missing so that if a phone number is missing I just get:

Name: Bob

Email: bob @ email .com

and not:

Name: Bob

Phone:

Email: bob @ email .com

I can't find any way of doing it, except by manually going through the generated document and that is more open to error.

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3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

IF your CSV file puts a tab in a blank field, you can do a search-and-replace for "Phone[tab]" and replace with just "[tab]." That's a little more automated than manual searching.

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Nice I had not thought of using that method. I imagine I could expand that to remove the line break at the end too. Lol for the username :) – Designer023 Feb 16 '11 at 15:11
thanks. :) you can use search-and-replace for applying styles as well, with a bit of finagling. – Lauren Ipsum Feb 16 '11 at 15:49
up vote 1 down vote

I am not sure that's possible unfortunately. In all my time using InDesign to do this, I've never come across an option or way to ignore the missing content's label.

It's a shame, maybe you can email Adobe and ask for it a a new feature in CS6 :D

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Haha nice idea, it would be pretty useful if it was an option. – Designer023 Feb 16 '11 at 14:56
up vote 1 down vote

InDesign really has to go with the lowest common denominator when it comes to importing data. What this means is that all raw data has to be properly formatted before import, in your case removing empty fields before importing.

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I can't actually remove the empty fields as some of the rows of data have the fields full and others don't. For example, some of the data will have a Phone number and some will have an email and some will have both. – Designer023 Feb 16 '11 at 14:54
How are you generating the data in the first place? If you have some kind of a script generating it, then perhaps modify that the parse fields before writing. The other way to go around this, and this is a bit kludgey, is to place your data points into separate text frames, and then script checking their content, removing empty frames and altering the layout accordingly. I say this is kludgey because the data should be better parsed and written first. – Philip Regan Feb 16 '11 at 15:10

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