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Pros and Cons of Catalog Plug-Ins?

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    • March 23, 2011 at 9:49 am #59056
      Cindy Wingo
      Participant

      I am testing out 3 catalog plug-ins to help me produce multiple catalogs with data from Excel. Does anyone have experience with or feedback on the pros and cons of InData, Easy Catalog or Smart Catalog? My catalogs are relatively simple listings, between 200 – 400 formatted pages of data. All three plug-ins seem pretty complicated to learn, but look like they will do the job. Any opinions will be appreciated.

    • March 23, 2011 at 11:46 am #59059
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      One of the questions is: Do you need a direct connection to a database? Or can you export the data from the database and then import that into a template in InDesign?

      InData is terrific; it's not that hard to master. I haven't used the others, but have seen and heard good things about them.

    • March 23, 2011 at 11:58 am #59060
      Cindy Wingo
      Participant

      At this point we would not need to connect to the database. Specific data is pulled for each catalog, so straight Excell works best for us now.

      I listen to you and Anne Marie all the time and love your podcasts. You guys ROCK! Actually, I am the InDesign Guru here because I listen to you.

      I am a little hesitant to get a product that is all scripting because I would probably the only one (out of 10 designers here) willing to put in the brain power to learn the scripting. But then, if it can run 8,000 lines of data in 20 minutes, who cares? The 50 lines of test data I got formatted (with Joe Mathia's help) looks beautiful. So you think scripting is “not that hard”, what planet are you from?

    • September 30, 2021 at 4:00 am #14347823
      John Kriho
      Member

      I realize this is an older post, but wanted to be sure our own DesignMerge variable data software was mentioned. Please have a look at http://www.meadowsps.com/designmerge-catalog.

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