InDesign: Create changeable "Profile Pages" from template

Question

I want to create a yearbook for my school with Profile-Templates (think about a Facebook profile). Let's assume i have 3 of these Profile-Templates. All contain various graphics, styles and placeholders but all of them will keep the same fields like "lastname" or "birthday".

I want to fill many pages made from these Template but on every page there will be other data (other birthday, other lastname, ...)

When I change styles/placement/... on this Template it syncs across all pages that use these (thus i can add finer design details later or fix errors without having to fix it on 200 separate pages).

When someone doesn't like their template and prefers a different one i can just apply a different one and because it contaisn the same fields the data such as "lastname" wont change but the new styles/placements/... apply to it.

This is my vision. Is this even remotely possible? It seems to utterly important in InDesign. For example when i create a cookbook i want every page to look the same more or less but always with different recipes and different image.

I thought Master pages would work fine here but it turns out I cannot change the Fields i put in it.

I already searched here on Stackexchange and via Google but because i don't know how the feature is called (or even if something like this exists) I'd like to ask you guys

I hope this is possible. My InDesign skills aren't very high but i basically took this project to learn it so don't shy away from giving me advice to use hard to use features. Thanks

Answer 1

To do that you would need to use DataMerge in ID. Lynda.com have good tutorials on that.

You can tackle the problem in many ways. For example you could present people with your designs, let them choose and then with a help of DataMerge pair their entry with chosen template.

Or

You could do three masterpages and then choose which person use certain template and apply it where needed.

Remember that masterpages don't need to have text boxes as DataMerge work in a way that it create additional pages/documents and the text is placed on regular page (not the template/master).