Reply To: xPresso for Adobe Indesign

And a very fine day to you Lynn

You've given me a much clearer picture of what xPression does than I could glean from the website.

Your comment about spending time “generating a properly built schema/data set, and learning the tool and building your templates. But – at the end of the day, what you have are templates that are easily reusable, with the added bonus of dramatically eliminating errors.” is the nub of the issue for me.

I can see how xPression would work extremely well for a large in-house operation where you have some considerable input into the format in which you will consistently the receive the data.

However, we're a small outfit which is fortunate enough to have the contracts to lay up the annual reports for a number of corporates and government departments. The blurb part of the reports comes to us in MS Word. (Have been trying to talk some of them at least into using InCopy for the front part for a number of years but for a varierty of reasons they each have a preference to continue using MS Word.)

The financials from each come to us as sets of MS Excel spreadsheets generated from their respective accounting systems, the spreadsheets being constructed to tie in with their respective internal management reporting layouts. Each set is constructed in ways peculiar (and I mean peculiar in all its senses :-) ) to the respective company or department and they vary from year to year. Unfortunately, if we can't even talk them into using InCopy, I don't imagine we'll be able to convince them to spend the necessary time and money at their end to consistently produce the data in form which would allow us to build templates. On the flip-side, the contracts also aren't of sufficient term to warrant us spending the time and money constructing templates.

Many thanks for making the time to give a comprehensive reply.

Kind regards, Gobit