Directory design in Xara

[Zaahir]

Hi Guys, I need to design a 100 page directory. What is the easiest way to design
the pages as in the attached image. Text will be copied from MS Word

Thanks
Zaahir

[handrawn]

use excel ?

or maybe a DTP program that handles columns well - xara doesn't afaik, but there are guys here who might know how to make that work

and the current version of xara has a paste from word issue that would complicate it if you did it that way

[Albacore]

Save it as a PDF from M/S Word it will copy all the cells and tables over but will not be editable. Like "handrawn" states the best type of programme would be something like Serif's Page Plus or Scribus which is free.

[mwenz]

I do a similar list for a national chain that supplies spices and botanicals. I haven't ever done something in PagePlus where a table would be 100 pages long. In my experience of using multi-page tables in it, though, I wouldn't want to unless I didn't have other options. At the current price of PagePlus, I would be tempted to put up with performance issues. Though I might break it into a series of publications, produce the PDFs and combine them in Acrobat or another editor capable of so doing.

Depending upon how the Word document is made, you can likely copy the info and paste into Excel or another spreadsheet application, do any sorting, save out a tab delimited CSV file, rename it to have an .sdb extension, and import it into a table directly. These tables can be styled automatically. Though when there are header rows down in the data (kinda looks like that from the screen shot), those would need formatted manually.

The main list I do for this company runs some 300 pages, 2 times a year. In addition, there are price supplements during the intervening periods, and special lists for some of their distributors that do not carry the entire product lines.

The screen shot below is from QuarkXPress but I use a data merge XTension from Em Software called XData (Em Software makes the same thing for InDesign as well called what else, InData). I cannot imagine doing this work without it, especially if it is repetitive.

The below isn't using a table at all. It is simply styled with a rule every other row. Where products change, it uses a darker rule below the text. The data merge is controlled through rules and can be written to only use one header from the data file until it finds the next header change. The entire 300+ pages is imported fresh each revision from their database, the merge runs along at 50k records per minute. It's done and the whole thing styled in mere seconds.



The point to all this is if this will be a recurring job, consider other avenues (even though they are more costly) than PagePlus.

[Zaahir]

Thanks for all the help guys much appreciated. Customer has agreed to send in excel.
I have the headers and footers designed in Xara already, so will paste the columns from excel (pdf) into Xara.

Once again thanks to all for your time