How do I add and format data variables?

Adding data variables to your text makes it possible to create texts that fit more than one specific data input

You are probably reading this article because you want to make text production more efficient. One way to do this is by adding data variables in your text.

Why is it more efficient? We will show you.

And product descriptions are an excellent example.

Instead of writing a manual product description for every product, you can write texts for several products or categories simultaneously, because most of the information you would write is already in the product data. 

Let us use this sentence as an example: 

This is a black dress in size XS from Zalando.

The marked words are product specific and will only apply to this exact product. But if you remove the marked words, it is actually a general sentence that could apply to any product.

This is an   in size   from  .

So how cool would it be if there were some way it could automatically fill out the information based on the data specific to the product? Thank God there is!

In the software, we call these data variables. 

Adding a data variable

Adding data variables is an easy thing to do. When writing your variants, you can either click on an empty space or mark a word, and a small menu will appear.

Clicking on "+ Variable" will open a box where you can access all the data available for this specific data input.

Here you can search or scroll to find the data variable you want to add.

In this case, we are looking for the colour. 

You can see the output for the data variable underneath the name. 

Adding a format to the data variable

When you find the desired data variable, click on it, and you will be able to choose a format. The format defines how the data variable will appear in the text. You can see the different outputs next to "Result".

Most formats will make sense by their name, but some are more advanced. You will be able to read about them in a later article.

In this case, we choose "Lowercase", as we add the data variable in the middle of a sentence. 

After this, remember to press "Save".

The data variable will then appear in the variant.

As you can see above, the data variable is marked with orange and appears with the variable name and not with the output. It shows the software that this is the place to write the colour. The output is dynamic and will change depending on the data input. 

And that is it! You have now added a data variable to the text.

If we go further with the previously used example, the text would look like this: