With Eas圜atalog, you just import your data into a panel and place them from there into your document, from manually up to fully automatically. I personally would not recommend Jim Maivalds solution because a) Excel and Unicode are not friends b) working with Excel and XML really is a pain c) the process is relatively complicated d) you need a lot of specialized skills regarding XML, XSLT programming and so on e) it's not bi-directional f) when updating you'll do the whole process again. I'd need many more details of what went wrong with your specific catalog in order to be able to point your attention to a different solution that may better fit your needs. In the meantime, I offer EC consulting and hands-on user training as well. I've used Eas圜atalog very successfully for a number of years now, even for really large catalogs (35,000+ articles). Also, another product called In-Data also interfaces with InDesign, but I have no experience with that either. I have not used it personally but I know people who have. If the data is in MS Access Woodwing has a product that allows you to interface and import data for a catalog. The entire process is described in detail in the book A Designer's Guide to Adobe InDesign and XML. Image references have to be built properly before you export to XML or build an XSLT that will do it on the fly as you import the data in to your layout.
If you move your data to InDesign you can save the time needed to build the XML spreadsheet. MS Access allows you to export directly to XML. Once the data is in the spreadsheet you can export to an XML file and import it into InDesign.Īs mentioned above you can map XML tags to Paragraph and character styles and create dynamic layout directly in InDesign or by using an XSLT to structure the data before you import it.
EASYCATALOG UPDATE DATA WINDOWS
What I do is either create a schema file (xsd) for the data that you want to use and import that into Excel on Windows (Mac version doesn't support XML) Once the schema is imported you can create an XML worksheet based on this schema and then copy and paste the data from the non-XML worksheet into the XML sheet. Don't save the file as an XML spreadsheet, that file is useless in InDesign. You can export the data from Windows Excel only to XML, but only when you create an XML-compatible worksheet. InDesign works wonderfully with XML and XSLT.
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