Transcript

When preparing your data merge templates for publication, you'll need to set up your PDF or JPEG or PNG outputs, just as usual.

However, one thing to note is that your PDF export settings are going to need to be set up specifically for data merge.

So let's hop into the CHILI Back Office to see what that means.

I'm going to navigate to my settings tab and come into my PDF export settings. I can see here I have the regular crops and bleeds, high res, low res PDF export settings here. But for our purposes today, we're going to create a new PDF export setting and we're going to set it up specifically for data merge templates.

So let's add new and name it and we can just call it something like PDF Data Merge and add. It's going to come in as our traditional PDF. I can see here that it's brought in my crops, bleeds, slugs. You can turn these on or off, leave them as you want. We do want to make sure that our fonts are embedded.

And the next thing we're going to do is scroll all the way down. And I can see a dropdown here called DataSource. So what we want to do is make sure that we check that we want to create a data source output here.

I'm going to talk to a couple of pieces in this section, but for the most part, they can be left alone. For example, these dropdowns can all stay the same and then this minimum success rate is set at a hundred percent. And we can see here that that means that all of our records need to be successful for our PDF to generate. Otherwise, it's going to fail out. This is probably going to be a good fail safe until you figure out what's working, that our end users know exactly what's needed.

The next piece I'd like to speak to is this PDF name pattern. What we're going to do here is use some of the different variable options that CHILI suggests to auto name our file output.

So let's take a look at what some of those naming conventions should look like. I'm going to do that by actually coming back into Tempo and showing you an example.

I've gone ahead and brought in a data source and I can see here that in this first column I have something called “pdfName” and this is what I want my actual PDF file to be called on export.

This could be a combination of first and last names, it could be the name of the campaign, the name of the template. It's completely up to you, whatever's going to work best for your team.

One thing to note though is this specific variable cannot have spaces or special characters, and that's because CHILI is using it in a file name and it would prefer those things not happen.

I am calling this column a variable because in order for it to work in our PDF name in the CHILI Back Office, it does need to be set up as a variable.

You would do this in your template in CHILI and you just wouldn't assign it to anything, but it allows the data source to pull that information and push it to the PDF name.

So now let's come into our Back Office and actually set that up. So I'm going to type in my percent, and I want to pull it from a variable. I saw that that variable is called PDF name. And now just like all of my other variables in the CHILI, I can close that with another percent mark.

I'm going to separate the counter with an underscore and then I'm going to put in this counter variable here. And what that is going to do is it's going to tell me what page number I'm on.

So if my PDF name is campaign A, when I export, I'll see “Campaign A_0001,” ...2, 3, 4, 5…and on down based on how many rows I have in my spreadsheet.

And now your PDF is ready to be saved and used in all of your data merge templates.