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Data-driven publishing. (Print Publishing).

Article Excerpt
Most designers entered the profession to express their creativity, but who has time to be creative when saddled with thousands of pieces of data that have to be formatted for a catalog, directory, price list, or schedule? Fortunately, you can turn these brain-numbing assignments into fun and lucrative projects. I'll show you how to do it, using the Xdata XTension (for QuarkXPress) and the InData plug-in (for Adobe InDesign) to create a fictitious real-estate catalog.

These types of projects fall into the category of data-driven publishing, where the data may come from a database or a spreadsheet. Database and spreadsheet programs don't offer sufficient design tools, so you need to export the data (names, addresses, prices, and so on) as text files and then import those files into a page-layout program. And so you don't have to manually format the data after importing, Xdata and InData automatically style each paragraph (or part of a paragraph) based on a prototype and rules you make.

Xdata and InData are both from Em Software ($400 each; 877/984-1010, www.emsoftware.com), and they are almost identical in form and function, but because there are currently more XPress users out there, I'll use Xdata to demonstrate. Two other add-ons from Em Software, Xcatalog Pro and InCatalog Pro, are complicated to use and more expensive ($800 each), but they allow you to push data from QuarkXPress or InDesign back into your database or spreadsheet--particularly helpful when you...

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