Remember, here's my absolute path, here are my relative paths, and what this notation here really means is InDesign. Look down one level and you'll find a links folder, inside that, you'll find this file, scooter_1.psd. It's a lot shorter, it's easier to police, to edit, to make sure that there aren't any problems with it, there's still some work involved, of course, in selecting that file name but you can see that it's a little easier to deal within this absolute path so I'm going to delete that absolute path and get rid of that. Once you've harvested those directory paths to identify the graphics in the Excel file, you have to do something else, you have to specially identify that column in a way that has meaning for the Data Merge function. The title needs to be the at sign and word, image, just no space in between, ah, but watch what happens when I try to make that entry. Excel squawks at me and the reason is that the at sign serves a special function in Excel and this is what this just doesn't seem right to me but I need that at sign for my Data Merge function. So, what I can do is what's called escaping, in other words, it's a way to the say to Excel, "No, no, don't invoke that special function, "I just need a plain old at sign", and to do that, I just type an apostrophe in front of that at sign. Now, InDesign can't digest this Excel file directly in the Data Merge function, I have to save it as a CSV file. That's really easy, you just choose File, Save As, and then choose Comma Separated Values for your file format. Once I've saved the Excel file, the CSV, it's ready to use in InDesign. By the way, I made two versions for you, one for Windows and a Mac version. So, make sure you pick the right one if you're working along in the exercise. Let's take a look at the CSV files I've provided for you in a text editor so that you can see the difference in them. Now, here's the Mac file, let's take a look at the CSV files I've provided for you here in the text editor so you can see the difference between the Mac version and the Windows version. #Add a photo in a indesign data merge mac.
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