Something like InDesign's Data Merge?

I'm super new to Xara and am just researching the capabilities. I know that there is a trial but my time is limited until school lets out.

I have been using Adobe products for several years but interested in checking out alternatives without a monthly subscription. Overall Xara seems to fit the bill but I do use InDesign to layout books and create playing cards and other components for games. InDesign has a feature that allows me to pull data from a spreadsheet(a .csv file)and use the rows to populate areas that I set on the cards. Here is an example of this in case that sounds confusing to you http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.com/...d-example.html.

So the big question is: Can I do this with Xara instead of InDesign? Thanks Xara Community!

Welcome to TG Daniel. No, that's beyond Xara's capabilities :(

just to expand on what egg said - a CSV file holds the data saved from the spreadsheet in delimited table format, and xara does not support tables - so it does not have the capability of placing imported data items into table cells

[and it does not support a CSV file in any other respect]

If you're looking for an alternative to ID then have a look at Serif's Page Plus and it's well priced. It handles its own data well but it gets a choosy with others types but most basic CSV from M/S Excel it handles. It does both Photo and Mail Merge but it works and it works well. I have used it to publish tickets, run mail merge for newsletters. I have also used the free type office programme and they work as well but not with the same ease. You pays your money or not but Serif's PP does not allow you to do a 30 day trial but it does have an unconditional money back guarantee if your not satisfied. You can buy page plus X9 for £20 which is the most recent version but they are about to release the new Affinity Publisher I think in early July and if the pricing goes the same way as Affinity Designer then the new one should cost around £30: http://www.serif.com/pageplus/

If one does get Serif's PagePlus and are using the 64-bit version, export your merge file to a .CSV (comma or tab delimited) from the spreadsheet application and simply change the file extension from .csv or .txt to .sdb and PP will like it better. If I recall, PP's .sdb it creates on its won are UTF-16.

There is a means around the 64-bit version not seeing Excel files, etc., for its mail merge function, but in general it isn't worth it.

Serif will be "lucky" to get a beta for Affinity Publisher out by the year's end. I doubt the release will hit by 1 January 2018 anyway. And no one outside of Serif knows whether a merge facility will be included the first release (not until we see the beta anyway). But APub will not have the current PagePlus facilities at the first release. And do note that PP files will not be importable into APub. Which leaves PDF import from one to the other.

Mike

Alright, thanks for the feedback everyone. Too bad, I was really hoping Xara would fit the bill. I'll look into PagePlus to see if this will work.