I work in Prepress on a fast 8 core Mac Pro with 8GB DDR3 RAM.
Doing a Data Merge using InDesign CS4 - here are the details:
Blank document (setup as #10 envelope)
No graphics
One text box with 10 fields:
FirstName LastName TrayNumber SortPosition
Address1 Address2
City State Zip
Intelligent Mail Barcode
8500 records in CSV file - no other data fields - just those placed in document
When merging 200 records, the merge is successfully done in around 3 seconds.
When trying to merge all 8500, the merge never completes - it takes about 15 minutes just to get to the "finding overset text...", and then I must close InDesign because it quits responding.
I tested doing a mail merge with the same data in Microsoft Word and it was done in a less than 2 minutes.
I tried this on 2 different Macs with the same non-results and can't believe InDesign's data merge functionality is this poor or inept.
Please - any insights?