Catalogs are where InDesign’s built-in merge gives up entirely. It knows exactly one pattern – one record, one fixed spot – but a catalog isn’t a stack of identical pages. Entries have different shapes, some need an image, some a table, some three lines of text, and the whole thing should run as long as your data demands. So the merge happens in Excel-to-clipboard-to-InDesign, page by page, by hand.
Layout Flow treats your records the way InDesign treats text: they flow. You design layout blocks – reusable units like a text entry, a table, an image with caption, a QR code block – and the node editor decides which block is placed for which record, driven by your data. Blocks flow one after another down the page and onto the next; new pages are added from your master spread as needed.
Product catalogs where entries run across pages. Member directories. Price lists exactly as long as the data. Instead of “one record, one page,” the document assembles itself from components – and when next season’s data has forty more products, the catalog is simply forty entries longer. No manual pagination, no rebuilt spreads.