I'm looking to develop location-specific posters for 43 cities across the U.S. for a concert event. I'm looking to leverage the Data Merge using a CSV File feature in Acorn 8.0.1. I'm currently referencing the official doc located on the Acorn 8 DOCs site. I've downloaded the `csv_employee_badge.zip` and am currently editing the `employees` CSV file. Here is the link to the doc I'm referencing:
The poster template I'm designing will have 3 headshot images of artists that change based on the city that is being performed in.
The following additional variables are being used on this poster template as well:
City Name
Date of Event (ex: Friday, March 7, 2025)
Event Time (ex: 7:00 PM)
Venue Name
Venue Address
Buy-Ticket link (3rd party service linked via URL)
Facebook Event Link
What Question Do I Have?
Is it possible for Acorn to handle multiple headshot images per poster using the provided CSV file? If so, do I need to specifically title the columns using a specific syntax? For example, in the CSV provided on the doc site, the headshot column Title is `@headshot`. Is the "@" required, or can the Title be something like "Headshot 1", "Headshot 2", and "Headshot 3" instead?
Additional Questions
For those of you who have used the Data Merge using CSV File function, are they any "gotchas" or tips/tricks you'd suggest to me given what I'm trying to accomplish?
Thank you so much for any/all help that comes my way - and if I need to provide any additional information please let me know and I’d be happy to provide it!
The @ is required so Acorn knows to load in an image. And yes, you can have multiple headshot images per poster, you just need multiple columns to reference it.
@ccgus The only issue I’ve seen with that, is when I go to make a second column in the CSV file, I name it @headshot2 I’m unable to save the column name due to the following error message in Excel…
How do I make another column of images if I can’t save the title with the @ symbol?
@MichaelEFP13 I don’t have Excel, so I’m not sure I can be of much help here. But looking at your screenshot, it seems that Excel is trying to assign your column to some sort of function, based on the SUM label above the header columns. Can you change that from SUM to something else? Or just say “no function here, it’s really just the name”.
@ccgus I’ve tried to do this as well, but for some reason the spreadsheet doesn’t allow for that kind of change/modification. It’s almost as if it requires that once the @ is used.
Curious if anyone from the Acorn team can expand on this?
The reason why Acorn uses the @ symbol is because it’s an industry standard for data merge from CSV files (“industry standard” is code word for “Adobe apps frequently do this and we try and be compatible with it”).
I just did some more digging on this though, and have a fix for you.
It turns out that if you prefix the header name in Excel with a single quote mark (') then Excel will let you use the @ symbol. So you could type in '@headshot2 for the column name and Excel is happy.
I’ve also updated Acorn for the upcoming release of 8.1 to accept '@ for image path references. You can grab this build from here: https://flyingmeat.com/download/latest/
@ccgus Thank you so much for that fix. I downloaded the version you provided and the Data Merge functions works as expected when attempting to facilitate multiple images (ex. @headshot, @headshot2, @headshot3).
@ccgus one more follow-up question. Now that I have the spreadsheet working, I’ve noticed that when doing the data merge, the images and titles that are imported are sized different than what the template is we’ve designed.
I’ve attached a screenshot of our template after the data merge import. The main thing I’m trying to resolve is how do I get the Speaker Headshots so that they’re all on the same line - so that they’re all visually aligned with one another?
When Acorn imports an image, it places the new image at the same x,y coordinates as the template’s opaque frame (this is the coordinates of the first visible pixels in the layer).
So if your imported image has transparent padding in it (like I’m guessing the middle image has), then it’ll appear to be offset by that amount of padding.
I’d make sure that the images you’re importing are all trimmed up so there are no transparent edges.