Every two weeks Quark VS InDesign.com and XChange International gives away 2 great prizes–an extraordinary xtension for QuarkXPress and an incredible InDesign plug-in. All you have to do to win is…

• Become a Quark VS InDesign.com member (free), and;
• Throw your name into the giveaway hat at the bottom of this page.

That’s all. No purchase or song and dance necessary. A winner will be chosen at random from those who enter on this page.

This contest has ended. On 2008-02-24 we gave
Xdata from Em Software
To Ed O. of Cainta, Rizal Philippines

Congratulations, Ed! Get some prizes for yourself on our Contests & Giveaways page.

The We Gave Away This Time

 
Xdata
from Em Software

Xdata is the best-selling XTension that brings the full typographic and picture publishing power of QuarkXPress to bear on all your data-driven repetitive publishing tasks: catalogues, directories, form letters, financial summaries, tables, labels, lists of all sorts, and more.

Completely integrated with XPress 6 and 7, Xdata automatically formats data exported from your Macintosh or Windows database and spreadsheet applications, or downloaded from your corporate information systems, freeing you from endless manual formatting. Xdata can also import related pictures (of any type supported by XPress) into boxes anchored in the incoming text.

Xdata is easy to use. In your database or spreadsheet application, you select and sort the data to be published, exporting it in standard ascii “data snapshot” format (comma- or tab-delimited). In XPress, you create a “template” for your prototypical record, including placeholders for each field–e.g., <>–formatted in any fashion. You then select “Import from file…” from the Xdata menu in XPress, choose the data file, and press Start in the Xdata control panel. Xdata does the rest, completely “hands off.”

Xdata gives you complete control. Xdata has a powerful English-like scripting language that lets you include or exclude fields, pictures and static text, based on the value of one or more fields in the current or previous record. Thus, you can create sophisticated record templates that apply different formats to a field, based on its or another field’s value, e.g., causing a page break or formatting a major heading in reverse type, given a change of value indicating a new section or subsection. You can even apply master pages as needed!

For industrial-strength publishing, Xdata places no limits on your data: records and fields can be as many and as long as you need, within the overall limits of XPress documents. Xdata can create multiple, independent “dictionary-style” headers and footers on each page or spread, with sophisticated controls over the header/footer contents.

QuarkXPress guru David Blatner’s MacWorld (October, 2001) article Print Publishing Secrets says “Anyone who regularly publishes information from a database or spreadsheet should have Em Software’s … Xdata. There are more expensive XTensions that offer greater database connectivity, but Xdata is brilliantly simple and powerful enough for most database-publishing tasks.”

Xdata has been field-proven world-wide at thousands of installations since late 1990, ranging from one-man freelancers to Fortune 25 sites, and remains a top selling XTension. Xdata has been successfully used in hundreds of different types of applications, including: