Reply To: Match and link content already paginated to xls data. And get back extra data.

Hi Riccardo,

To answer your questions :

Have you checked if there is a remote possibility to gain some results with scripting in Easy Catalog?
EasyCatalog is generally powerful enough to avoid the need of scripting. But in some cases, it can help. You can use scripts on two levels with EasyCatalog. First one is at field level meaning that you can execute a jsx script to return a specific field value. This is something I introduced here :

Real time Currency Conversion within Adobe InDesign

You can on a second level buy and use the scripting module that will allow anyone to drive the easycatalog plugin in a context of a script ( paginate records for example). I did some developments in this area for a client of mine that wanted to output properly named PDF based on EasyCatalog Datasheets generation.
So the latter is only needed if you want to drive EasyCatalog by scripting. Otherwise you can use scripts into a field. But once again, there are so many features that scripting is barely needed.

Why datamerge or csv import doesn’t allow data dynamic linking?
Hé hé ask Adobe Folks ;)

What’s the difference with xml/Easy Catalog import (briefly)?
You can certainly do advanced stuff with XML. I built Catalogs based on XML imports. I just find it’s quickly limitating. Layouts tends to be UBER complicated with unlimited combinations of anchored objects. Pretty hard to maintain and updates are all but safe in my humble opinion. Also you will have a greater learning curve befor you can get something out of it and eventually need to learn some XSLT.
If you are a learner and some time free ahead you can explore XML import for your project but I bet somehow you will do teh same statements I did ;)

The only way to easily make selective import of data from an xls table (for example) is by Easy Catalog-like plug-in?
To be fully honest, EasyCatalog is one of a few that can indeed link a xls file to an indesign document. Not the only one but as it’s the only one I master, I will stick to it. So yes, it’s a great tool to work with XLS files. You can work with subsets of data without touching the source file by filtering/grouping…

If you do catalogs a lot, that’s definitively a tool to consider.
HTH

Loic