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Data merge help

Started by wonderings, May 03, 2021, 08:36:09 AM

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jwheeler

Quote from: wonderings on May 04, 2021, 12:08:51 PM
Thanks for the link, looks interesting but honestly and no offence to you, I hate when prices are not posted on their website and demos require you to request one. I should not have to go through a sales person just to see if it would even be in budget and worth while. And again no demo unless I request and then I am assuming a sales person gets a hold of me to try and get me to buy rather then letting me check it out and search on my own. If I have questions I would ask. My VDP needs are light, what I am dealing with now is the first time I have ever come across this so I am not going to go through all the hoops just to get a price and a demo. This is 2021, none of this should be necessary. I guess this is where this emoticon is used  :git off mah lawn:

No offense taken. I'm not a sales person for them - I work in a print shop myself. I just know it's a good product. I used to sell the production printing line of printers and software for Konica Minolta, and we sold DesignMerge under a relabeled name....customers always really liked it.

I agree that it's annoying when they don't post prices and require demos, but it's because there are optional modules and they want to make sure they can explain them clearly and you get the right setup. I think with software especially, they should be able to make short YouTube videos showing what each module does, and let people choose to buy it on their own, and request a demo if they need further explanation - but alas, they do not. Someone else mentioned FusionPro and they do the same thing of not displaying pricing on their site. They show the pricing for their base product, but if you click on the more advanced versions, they require you to see a demo first.

I can tell you for DesignMerge, the basic one-license version used to be about $1,000, and the more advanced Pro version started around $3,000 depending on which modules you get. Not sure what it is now.

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I can only say, if you are doing enough work to justify the cost, designmerge is a great tool with many tricks to get the job done.

DigiCorn

Quote from: wonderings on May 04, 2021, 05:59:42 AM
Quote from: DigiCorn on May 03, 2021, 10:32:11 PM
We used to merge to file, and then fix the offending records manually. Most of our data merges in-house were a few thousand records, and we typically merged <500 records at a time (trays usually max at 380 or so for USPS), so you'd only have to fix a couple out of the whole batch.

If you ever spend the <$1000 to get Fusion Pro, it will make that adjustment upon checking a box, and could be modified with a simple script adjustment.

Would fusion pro be used for a merge inside a catalogue? Not addressing or anything for mailing but a list of products sequentially over a span of pages? Pretty much all the variable I do is simple mailing which Indesign handles perfectly. I just get these unique cases every now and then and am left scrambling to figure it out on a deadline.
You *could* but it would depend on the number of pages, and quantity of books as to how much of a hassle you want to deal with. I did data merge newsletters of roughly 16 pages with variable data on just the OFC and OBC, and how I ran it depended on which shop. One shop had CWS, so I ran all the covers separately, and then used the Insert function to marry them to the rest of the book to fold and saddle stitch. At the other shop we had the Xerox with Freeform and I ran the whole book as a single file and told it to fold and stitch after every 6 pages (3 sigs). There were only a couple hundred of these books, so it was okay, but if it were bigger and a larger quantity, I don't know how you'd run it... but FusionPro does have built into the impo software a split options, so you could run the software and have it split every 100 books or so....

If you're using CWS, this might be a perfect use of the master page/imprint feature of the impo software option. That would allow you to upload the booklet as a single file and then upload the imprint file separately and marry them in the CWS. Cuts the processing time down to almost nothing, especially if it's a K imprint.
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