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TRLucas
Participating Frequently
May 19, 2021
Question

Mass Catalog Product Pricing

  • May 19, 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 2065 views

I am a professional novice when it comes to my Adobe skills. Although I have been using the products at my job for many years, and loving them, I am not “trained”. So…

 

I want to create a catalog (the product catalog I have now is over 500 pages, created by another product, that shall remain nameless, that I inherited) where I can have many product tables with varying details, but they always will include a part number and prices. Sometimes the prices are single column, sometimes they are multiple columns. Additionally I’d like to have a column header for the prices that indicates price breaks (1-4, 5+, etc).

 

I am convinced there is a way to create my pages “artistically”, place the tables of product data on the pages, and whenever I need to update pricing using an external import type process like an Excel spreadsheet with part numbers, prices and column headers I can. Am I CRAZY? Is this possible? Some kind of automated process to fill data in a mass upload type way for multiple thousands of parts, year-end year out.

 

HELP?

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    1 reply

    Dave Creamer of IDEAS
    Community Expert
    Dave Creamer of IDEASCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 20, 2021

    If you have strictly text-based tables, you can link to an Excel file, using Table and Cell styles. The tables can flow across multiple pages or can be numberous stand-alone tables (these can be saved as separate Excel files or as separate worksheets in an Excel workbook).

     

    If you want updates in a "artiistic" page layout, you will need a third-party plug-in. These are generally not inexpensive. If you are interested in some products, let me know and I'll list some.

     

    If you are dealing with QuarkXPress pages, check out Markzware's Q2ID plugin.

    David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)
      T
      TRLucasAuthor
      Participating Frequently
      May 20, 2021

      I'm not sure what strickly text based tables means.

      What I was thinking of was being able to link one large external spreadsheet of data containing only the look-up field and the pricing information. Then linking it with the hundreds of small independent tables in the InDesign document that would have the link field and the other fields for pricing that would need to be populated. Kind of like the Vlookup process in Excell. 

       

      What you describe seems like I would still need to create individual excell tables and place those in my ID document. That doesn't help eliminate the manual process of  maniuplating each table, or am I still not understanding this?

        Dave Creamer of IDEAS
        Community Expert
        Dave Creamer of IDEASCommunity Expert
        Community Expert
        May 20, 2021

        Text-based tables are tables that contain only text, not graphics. Below is an example of an 89-page table (not a catalog price list, but same concept). This could easily be linked to an Excel file if continual updates were required. You don't technically need to link to individual worksheets--you could link to Excel named regions too. When the Excel file(s) are updated, the InDesign tables can be automatically updated. 

        If you need to link to individual fields spread around the page layout rather than in a table format and you want to auto-import referenced graphics, you will need a database plugin. Most of these can work with CSV, tab-delimited, and Excel files; some can connect directly to a database. (InDesign has a basic Data Merge function, but I suspect it won't do what you want.)

         

        If you could upload a screen capture of the type of layout you want to create, it would be helpful.

        David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)
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