Exporting Data to CSV to TXT format

[Jerry Ross]

Hi all,

I am trying to export data to a Comma or Tab delimited file for use with a data merge feature in InDesign CS with the Pagemaker data merge feature.

I have done this numerous times before from Excel and it has worked great.

However, when I export my data from FM and then try to select the file as a data source InDesign does not recognize either of the formats as a text file.

Any suggestions or input?

jerry

[Fenton]

There is nothing special inside the text file. So I would suspect the extension. Did you try ".txt" instead of ".tab"?

[Jerry Ross]

I did change the extention to .txt.

One thing I noticed was that FM did not export the field names, which InDesign needs to read the data.

Is there a way to tell FM to do that?

[Fenton]

If you export as a Merge file you get the fields in the first row, comma-separated, but without quotes. The following lines have the quotes. If it doesn't like that, I'm not sure what to try next. Find what the heck it does want (quotes in the 1st line?). You can export with an XSL stylesheet to produce whatever. I have examples of this, for either .csv or tabbed text.

[Rigsby]

You can export to any format and have Filemaker include field names as the first values in the file. The trick is to create a dummy (empty) record and set the field values in that record to the field name values. Then make sure you use sort criteria that guarantees that the dummy record is the first record in the set. Export the set, and you have the field names as the first entry in your text (or whatever) file. :-)

[Jerry Ross]

Ah, cool, such a simple solution.

Thanks for the tip. I'll try that and see if InDesign will read the file.

Since last posting my question I imported a text file into Excel and noticed that there is an unusual character that looks like a square where there would be a carriage return. I read in Adobe's forums that this could be a problem when using with InDesign.

So I'll have to strip those out in Excel.

One other thing I noticed is that the values for my caculated fields came across as Zeros in the export. I can't explain why that would happen.

Any suggestions anyone?

thanks,

jr