A layout is your design – the InDesign document DataMergeStudio fills with data. It’s the "shape" of every document you produce: the fonts, colors, frames, and positions stay fixed, while the content changes record by record.
You build and edit your layout in InDesign, exactly as you always have. DataMergeStudio doesn’t replace your design work – it drives InDesign to pour data into the design you’ve made. Anything InDesign can do, your layout can do.
A plain InDesign document becomes a merge template once it contains placeholders – the spots that data flows into. A placeholder can be a piece of text, an image frame, a QR code, or a barcode. Everything around the placeholders – your grid, styles, and static design – stays the same on every record.
A layout on its own does nothing; a datasource on its own is just a table. The merge happens when the two meet: each record from your master sheet is poured through the layout, and the result is one finished document. Map once, and you can run the same layout against fresh data again and again.
See what DataMergeStudio reads from your file: What Happens When You Import an InDesign File?