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I'm a basic user of InDesign.

I have to import many (hundreds) of paragraphs into a page layout consistent of many Text Frames per page. Each page looks like so:

enter image description here

I have all the paragraphs on a spreadsheet where each cell is a paragraph.

My current workflow is to copy a full page in InDesign, paste it after the last page and then manually replace the content of each of the Text Frames with the next paragraphs. This is of course not very efficient.

Do you know of a way to automate or at least streamline this process?

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InDesign has a feature called "Data Merge" which allows you to create a layout, tag some frames in it and import a .csv* file.

Take a look at these docs from Adobe https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/data-merge.html or search for the term "InDesign Data Merge".

* comma separated values - can be exported from Excel or Google Spreadsheets)

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  • @buzherbert I concur with fabian's answer: data merge is probably what you're looking for. However I would recommend using a tab delimited .txt file instead of comma separated .csv. As we can see in your screenshot, there are commas in your text, so they will mess up the data merging process.
    – Vinny
    Feb 2, 2018 at 7:12
  • Thanks a lot! I am almost done with my ugly slow process, but will check this for future uses!
    – buzoherbert
    Feb 2, 2018 at 7:28
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    @Vinny Just in case it’s not clear to someone else from your comment, CSV files can be comma-separated as well; they don’t have to be TXT files. And an extra caveat for InDesign’s Data Merge feature: if you have any special characters, you need to have your data file Unicode-encoded. Note that this means the otherwise rarely used UTF-16, not the far more ubiquitous UTF-8, which will become garbled when you import it.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Feb 4, 2018 at 1:35

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