Quark Forums

Hi,

Our executive director wants to personalize things like postcards, flyers, etc. with person's name or company. Short of doing each one individually (more than 1000) every time, is there something we are missing in Quark that allows us to merge data? Or is there an extension available that would do this? As a nonprofit, cost is a factor. Thanks in advance for your help!

chamberman:

Hi,

Our executive director wants to personalize things like postcards, flyers, etc. with person's name or company. Short of doing each one individually (more than 1000) every time, is there something we are missing in Quark that allows us to merge data? Or is there an extension available that would do this? As a nonprofit, cost is a factor. Thanks in advance for your help!

Hi Chamberman,

Your solution lies in using the automatic text flow combined with auto insertion of pages at the end of story.

First, you setup your master page with the proper text and graphics that will make up your postcards, flyers, etc. leaving any "variable" date to reside within the automatic text chain.

Now on the first page of your document, type in Sample text in the automatic text chain with the desired text.

Note: If your variable text necesitate multiple boxes (which needs to be linked on the master) make sure you use the "next box character" (Enter) to get chase the next to the next box.

Create the necessary style and character sheets and apply them to the corresponding variable text. Next, save this text as "XPress Tags text".  You will now have a dummy text to play with. You can duplicate the needed text and replace the parts as you see fit. Chances are you can adapt an Excel worksheet to do the same where you insert columns of text containing whatever text falls between two field of the same entry.

For instance you might have an Excel sheet laid out like so:

after adapting your sheet, you should get something like:

You then need to save that new sheet as text and then, in a text editor, replace all occurences of "<\b>¶" with "<\b>" and save your text again.

Lastly, import that text into the first text box that belongs to the automatic text chain and you should get the desired results.

Hope this helps! 

I'm wondering if you can be more specific and give me more detail on how to set up my QuarkXPress and Excel documents.  I have my flyer finished in QuarkXPress.  I have my excel document with three columns: fname, lname and Company.  I think I have set up the XPress Tags text on the flyer correctly in the linked text box on the flyer and saved it as XPress Tags.  Now I'm not sure how to get the Excel document to flow into the Quark Document? Please advise, thanks.