Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you how to make business
cards using information from a spreadsheet with Data Merge in Adobe InDesign. All right,
let's get started. Now at the end of this video, your document is going to have one business card
on each page, and then we'll export to PDF. And that is the standard way to hand off business
cards to a printer. If you need multiple business cards on each page, I also have another video that
goes over how to do this, except it's with address labels. So that video will be on the screen above,
and also in my description below. You'll also need an Excel sheet or a Google Sheet with all
the business card information in it. I'll be using a Google Sheet in this tutorial because everyone
has access to that as opposed to Microsoft Excel. Okay, so let's head over to InDesign. Alright,
so I'm here in Adobe InDesign, and I'm just going to open up a business card that I've already
created. So I'll come over here to Open and I'll open it up. First, let's go over how your document
should be set up for a business card. So I'm going to come up here to File > Document Setup.
Facing Pages should be off. Usually, you'll just have one page, and then your width will be
three and a half inches by two inches. That's the standard business card size in the USA.
Margins don't really matter for this tutorial. You'll need an eighth of an inch of bleed - that
is standard. If you have areas of color that go off the edge, or like this graphic goes off the
edge, if you have anything like that other than just white, you'll want a bleed. So that's .125
on all four edges. And so that's it, we'll say OK. You can't see the bleed right now,
but if I hit W on my keyboard, and then move this a little bit, you can see a red line outside of
your document. And that's where all your graphics should extend to. So we've got to go all the way
to the red line or past it a little bit. And that's the eighth of an inch overhang. Now,
when you're creating your business cards, there are a couple of things that are really
important. You'll have a spreadsheet with a lot of different names and a lot of different titles.
And so each one of those different things needs to be in its own text box. The other important
thing - your text boxes need to be long enough to accommodate the longest name in your spreadsheet.
So I've got a spreadsheet, I'll pull that up right now. So I'm on Google Sheets, and this spreadsheet
that I've set up just has name, title, email address, and all those things, and I put those in
row 1. That's all you need to do - you don't need to do anything special for InDesign to know that
this is not actually information you want on the business card. It just knows to pull
whatever is in row 1, and it's sort of like a placeholder. But everything from row 2 on down
will be a business card once we're through. Okay, so I'm going to go back to InDesign now.
And I actually want all of this information to be on a Master page. So I'm going to click
my Pages button. If you don't see any of these windows, you can come right up here to Window
and Pages this here. Okay, so we've got everything, I've got everything selected, I'm
going to cut it with CMD X or CTRL X. I'm going to double click on my master page, which probably
doesn't look a lot different when you do that, but it's sort of a template that will apply to every
page you want it to. And now I'm going to Paste in Place with SHIFT OPTION CMD V, that SHIFT CTRL ALT
V. And now we can see everything up here in the Master page. And when we double click on our page,
it's gone. So first, what we want to do is just click and drag this Master page onto our page,
and that puts everything onto our page again. Now you won't be able to select it here, and that's
generally how Master pages work. The things that are on the Master page you cannot select. But the
thing is, we need to get in here to delete this information so that we can tell it to pull from
the spreadsheet. Now when we do this, we want to make sure we're on Pages and not on the Master
page. And now will hold SHIFT and CMD and double click - that's SHIFT and CTRL and double click
on a PC - and then just delete the text. And you want to go through all the text boxes and do the
same thing. Okay, now when we do this, we have to have a CSV file coming from Excel or your Google
Sheet. So let's go back to our Google Sheet, and in here, we can go to File > Download and
Comma Separated Values (CSV). If you're in Excel, you want to do File > Save As > Comma Separated
Values (CSV).. So we'll do that and it'll come down here, if you're using Google Chrome.
We'll want to Show in Finder with that little carrot there. And then I'm just going to drag
this CSV file where all my other files are for this tutorial, which is up with my InDesign file,
and all that. Okay, so we have it in there now. Now we need to kind of hook it up
to InDesign. And to do that, we'll come up here to Window > Utilities and Data Merge.
And when we do this, we'll get this little window. It'll give us some instructions, but I'll just
walk you through the process. So we'll come out here to the flyout and choose Select Data Source.
And then we'll navigate to our CSV file that we just saved,
and we'll open that. And then you can see that everything on row 1 is given to us here
as sort of a button. Okay, so let me pull that out a little bit. Now, when we do this,
we want to make sure we're on Pages and not on the Master page. So make sure you're on your page.
And then I'm going to click that first box that we deleted everything from, and I'll click Name.
If you can't see the outlines of your boxes, try hitting W on your keyboard. That toggles to
a view where you can see everything and then one where it's more clean, and you can't. But anyway,
we'll want to go ahead and click on all the little buttons. So we'll do Email Address down here,
Physical Address and Phone Number. Okay, now I'm going to zoom out a little bit,
and I'm going to hit W to hide all those boxes. If you see something that's bothering you,
you can fix that. But you'll need to do it in the Master page. So for example, this phone number
down here looks a little low. So I'm going to come into the Master page, click on that and just move
it up a maybe one or two little clicks, and then come to the Page, and it'll adjust there. When
everything's ready, you can go ahead and Preview, and it'll drop in the first name that's on the
spreadsheet. And we can actually run through every single record that's coming from the spreadsheet
just to make sure that everything looks right. When we're sure that everything's ready,
go to this little button right here. It'll say Create Merged Document. We can just click on that,
and then we'll get this dialog box. We'll want all records up here and then single record down here.
And we also want to leave these two checked in case there's overset text, which means
the text is too long for the box. And if it is, it'll give us a little report - it'll say, hey,
you need to make your text box bigger. And this one is more for images. We don't have
to worry about that, but I'm gonna leave it on. And we'll say OK. And then InDesign will
go through the process of making a big long document with all the business cards in it.
And we'll get this alert that says no overset text was generated. So everything is all good. So we'll
say OK. Now if you did get an overset text alert, you'll need to go back, go to your A Master,
and then find which one had the overset text and just make that box a little bit bigger so that
it can hold all the text in the spreadsheet. Okay, so let's go back to the document that was created.
And I'll scroll down and see all the pages. We've got 46 pages because there are 46 records.
And usually when I send this to the printer, if I have a back of a business card, I'll add it
at the very end and just send them an email that says 'Hey, you know, all these are front and then
the back is at the end.' You don't need to put one in between every single one or anything like that,
unless they specifically requests that of course. Okay, so to export this,
you'll probably want to talk to your printer, My printer always wants a PDF with crops and bleeds.
So based on that, I'm going to Export. File > Export. I'm going to choose Adobe PDF, Print,
and Save. And I'll start out with Press Quality. That'll give us a really nice clean print,
as long as everything has high enough resolution, which it is because it's vector. I'm going to come
down here to the marks and bleeds, and I'll choose Crop Marks here. I'm going to leave these things,
they generally are fine the way they are. And then for the bleed and slug, I already have
my document bleed settings set up. So if I click this, it's going to pull that eighth of an inch in
from the document that we set up earlier. And we'll say Export, and it'll do its thing and
then we can come out here. And here's the PDF it created. Let's double click that. And as you can
see, we've got the crop marks which come into the bleed area 1/8 of an inch so they can cut right
here right along the crop marks and still have enough overhang in case they mess up a little bit.
So here are all of the records and these match up with the records on the spreadsheet,
so we're good to go. Okay, if you liked this video and you want to see more videos like this,
just hit the Subscribe button and the little bell next to it and you'll be notified every
time a new video comes out. Alright, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!!