This project was a unique challenge and a great learning experience. In 2022 Shaw hired a research company to send “secret shoppers” to more than 1,200 dealers. I was asked to design a “report card” template that would present the findings for each individual retailer… And then I had to figure out how to automatically generate more than 1,000 report cards.
The file is fully responsive to accommodate the variable data for each report. Styling, pagination, page breaks, etc. are all handled automatically, fed from a spreadsheet. I used InDesign’s data merge feature to tag each record, and then it was just a lot of testing and troubleshooting until we came back with 1,200 error-free reports!
Below, you can see an example of one of the reports. Notice how specific the data is — the reports ended up ranging from just a few to more than ten pages, and each one is unique to a specific retailer.