This article is taken from InDesign Magazine," Issue 11. To buy this issue or subscribe to InDesign Magazine," click here.

Clients have no problem asking for the impossible, like 300 personalized invitations and name tags -- to be printed tomorrow. Thanks to an overlooked InDesign feature called Data Merge, you can make the impossible possible.

Italy-based trainer, designer, and Adobe evangelist Rufus Deuchler is an InDesign whiz. In this step-by-step how-to, he explains how easy it can be to create one InDesign template and fill it with text (like those 300 names) from a .txt or .csv file. It's like Microsoft Word mail merge, except you've got the benefit of InDesign's excellent text-composition engine and graphic features.

The recipient of this invitation will never know it took you just seconds to generate:

To download the sample files for the project and follow along, go to http://www.creativepro.com/files/downloads/ACME_Cosmetics.zip.

To download the step-by-step tutorial, just click the link "Automate_InDesign."

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