You will need to create your background graphics, logo, and anything else that will be repeated on each name badge. Open a new InDesign document and place the graphics how you would like them, and to the specific size that you need. Create these graphics in the top left of the document. You will only need to create these one time. I had the company send me the list of the attendees in an Excel spreadsheet. One column will have the names of the attendees, and each additional column would have any additional information separated into individual columns. For example, this company had customer numbers, the company name, and the city and state as the additional information. So you would have a column for their name, a column for their customer number, a column for their n name, a column for their city, and a column for their state. Next, if they have not named the columns, you will need to create a header at the top of each column, called it something. This is vital, but will not be displayed in the printed document. Once this is done, it is time to save the document. This is very important- you need to save it as a tab delimited file. This is so that InDesign can pick this up and properly distribute the information. With this done, it is time to go back to InDesign. Grab the text tool and create text boxes where you want each bit of information to be on every name badge. Here, you can format each text box to specify the look that you want. It is important to do this now, before we create the badges, otherwise you will have to format each individual badge, which is what we are trying to get out of doing. You can make the name larger and bold, the city and state italicized, etc. Simply put, make the text look how you want the final piece to look. Go to your window menu at the top and choose Automation> Data Merge. Click the flyout menu on the right-hand side and choose select data source, and select the tab delimited text file you made earlier. In the Data Merge panel, you will now see fields that are the names that you gave the columns earlier. You will use these to link your text boxes to the data in the spread sheet. Click the text box that you want for the name, and then click the name field in the Data Merge panel.
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