InDesign databse driven content 1

[ElfMaster]

We are trying to set up a catalog/price book that can have the content pulled from a database. We are using InDesign CS. I am a designer with little database and programming experience. Is there anyone who can answer basic questions about the process and how to set up ID to pull the data from and Excell spread sheet?

 

[AdobeTim]

The PageMaker plug-in pack for InDesign has a datamerge plug-in the might do it for you. There are other third party solutions of varying degrees of complexity. WoodWing, Sansui Software, and others have plug-ins that do variable data publishing.

you'll probably be exporting the data from the spreadsheet as a text file and importing it into ID into some sort of tagged text/graphic frames.

 

[ElfMaster]

Thank you AdobeTim. That looks like the easiest and least expensive solution. I checked into it and it looks like it might work for us, although the documentation on the process is a bit thin.

 

[AdobeTim]

Which documentation are you looking at? When you install the PM plug-ins for ID, the documentation gets added to ID's online documentation, and I think that material appears pretty adequate.

 

[ElfMaster]

Since we don't have the plug-in yet, I was reading the help files in PageMaker until we do get the plug-in. Also, I have very little experience with spread sheets and data bases, so I am trying to figure out how the tables and cells in PM relate to those in the spread sheet.