Automate Catalog from Database
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Learn / Forums / InDesign Add-ons (Scripts, Scripting, and Plug-ins) / Automate Catalog from Database
Learn / Forums / InDesign Add-ons (Scripts, Scripting, and Plug-ins) / Automate Catalog from Database
Hello,
We’re wanting to tackle a big project – creating a catalog with 900+ products with their associated information and photos. And of course we want to beautifully format it in InDesign – copy formatting vis styles, variety of page layouts, etc.
The copy is kept in our product database (specifically FlexPLM, which operates on Oracle. It can export Excel, but not XML). Some images are also stored within the database, I’m checking internally to see if they’d be accessible at the right image quality for printed catalog. The images will also be stored on a local server.
We’ve have previously exported Excel and used InDesign’s Datamerge to do a few smaller catalogs. This is better than copy and pasting, but does not allow for automatic updates and would take longer for the full line than our timeline allows.
I see some posts about plug-ins (EasyCatalog, Teacup’s DataMerge, etc) but the posts are over a year old. Are there any current recommendations? What criteria should I keep in mind while evaluating the options?
Thank you!
Somerset
Hi Vasha,
EasyCatalog is a good option to me. Can ingest Excel files as inputs or even link to your database. Much more flexible than datamerge especially for huge catalogs projects.
Feel free to get in touch with us at ozalto.com for more details.
Loic
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