XData for QuarkXPress

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: