Conditional formatting
Data Merge can't handle conditional formatting. For example, let's say you are publishing a directory of members of an association or club. Every member is entitled to a free listing, but they can also opt to pay for an enhanced entry, in which case their details will be set in a bold font. Data Merge cannot facilitate this.
But CatBase can! CatBase gives you lots of options for conditional formatting of your data. Take a look at the Conditional Formatting Tutorial for more info.
Automatic creation and sizing of text and picture boxes
With Data Merge, you create text and picture box templates and then fill them with data from the merge file. All boxes that are created from the template will be the same size. This is perfectly fine for many projects (name badges, price labels, door signs, business cards, and that sort of thing) but for other types of project you may want the boxes to be sized to fit a variable amount of text or differently sized pictures. Data Merge cannot handle those situations.
But CatBase can! CatBase works with a plugin for InDesign called Xtags (published by Em Software) for the automatic creation of text and picture boxes. The boxes can either be anchored (linked to the surrounding text) or unanchored (free-standing), and you have complete control over the styling of the boxes: frame thickness, colour, and style; background colour; box shape, etc. The following screen shot shows the text box setup dialogue in CatBase:
Note the Shrink to Fit check box. Select this option and the text box will initially be drawn at the specified size, but once the contents have been placed and styled, the box will shrink to the appropriate height.
Now here's a screen shot showing the Picture Box setup dialogue box:
Notice the Picture Size options. You can specify a set size for each picture; size the picture box automatically, according to the actual dimensions of the picture; or a hybrid of the two: specify a maximum size (Set Size) and then select the Size the box to fit the picture option. This will create a box in which the picture fits proportionally with the specified size parameters.
Conditional Content
Suppose you have a situation where you need to publish different data based on some criterion or other – for example, if the member is an Chartered Member you want to publish a brief description of their business; if they are an Associate Member, then their description doesn't get published. Data Merge cannot make decisions like that.
But CatBase can! CatBase has a Formula feature which enables you to tell it how to make decisions on what to publish and, optionally, how to format it, based on criteria that you specify. The Formula dialog looks like this:
Formulas work on an "If-Then-Otherwise" construction: IF something is true, THEN do this; OTHERWISE do something different. In the example shown here, we want to set the names of all chocolate products in a different style. So our Formula tells CatBase: If the Product Name contains the word "chocolate", then publish the Product Name and assign the style "chocsyle" to the paragraph; otherwise, publish the Product Name but use the default style for the paragraph. As you can see from the options available in this dialog, you can do many different things with Formulas: publish a picture if some condition is met (the picture can be a picture that belongs to the record, or it can be a specific picture, such as a "New Product" splash); include or leave out a paragraph; publish punctuation, such as a Tab or Next Page character; run a script; change the style for the entire paragraph of just for one element within a paragraph.
Calculations
Perhaps you want to reduce the price of all Sale items by 20% when your catalogue or price list is published (without changing the source data). Data Merge can't do that.
But CatBase can! Calculations enable you to do things like mark up or discount prices:
Calculations can be used in conjunction with Formulas to get CatBase to decide what to do. For example, suppose you have flagged certain products as Sale items. You could create two Price paragraphs. In the first one, you would have a Formula which says "If the product is on sale, include this paragraph" and then you would have a Calculation which discounted the price. The second Paragraph would also contain a Formula: "If this product is not on sale, publish the price as-is' otherwise leave this paragraph out" and then simply publish the price.
Tables
Data Merge doesn't provide a way to automatically create tables. But CatBase does!
CatBase provides very sophisticated table-creation options. The Table Format option lets you define the basic parameters for a table style:
Note that InDesign (CS3 and later) table styles are supported.
Once you've created a Table Style, you then simply select the Table option for a paragraph and specify the options for each column. This screen shot shows the options that have been selected for the "Code" column in a table:
Here are a couple of examples of tables created by CatBase:
Data Sources
Data Merge supports only two types of data source: comma-delimited (CSV) text files and tab-delimited text files.
CatBase supports many types of data source:
- Comma-delimited text files
- Tab-delimited text files
- Text files with custom delimiters
- Fixed-length text files
- XML files
- DBF files
- ODBC-compliant data sources, such as MySql and MS Sql Server (Data Chameleon Edition)
- CatBase's own database
So why not use CatBase?
Data Merge is included with InDesign for free; CatBase isn't free! You can see the pricing here.
For a quick overview of how CatBase works, please see this video.