CatBase Tutorials

Learning and Using CatBase

We've created a series of tutorials to help you find out how to use CatBase to create your publications. They are divided into three sections:

Setup: Deciding how to get your CatBase database set up, importing and adding data
Maintenance: Finding and editing data and working with it
Publishing: Creating your publications

Database 101: A basic introduction to databases
Starter Projects: Some example databases that you can use as a basis for your own project
Starting a new database project: a step-by-step guide to setting your project up from scratch
- Table Structure: How to decide on the tables you'll need
- Database Setup Wizard: a Wizard that helps you to set up your tables and fields
  - Field Properties: Adding or modifying the fields in your tables and choosing their behaviours
- The Form Design Wizard: Designing your data entry forms
- Getting data into your database
  - Adding data manually
  - Importing Data
    - From a spreadsheet such as Excel
    - Importing into related tables
- Publishing your data
Getting to know the CatBase interface
Sorting your data
Setting up an automatic backup schedule
Adding data manually
Importing Data
- From a spreadsheet such as Excel

Finding and Editing data
Create Sets to define and maintain groups of data
Entering and publishing related data
Creating Quick Reports
Send emails to contacts in your database, and receive emails sent to a designated email address.
Use the Event Scheduler to perform tasks at specified time intervals
Run scripts to perform special processing on your data when records are imported, modified, or saved.

An overview of the publishing process
How CatBase and your page layout program work together
Creating Publishing Style Sheets: these are what tell CatBase what data to publish and how to sort and format it
- Creating Formulas to tell CatBase how to make decisions about what to publish and/or how to format it
- Conditional Formatting: How to get CatBase to make text styling decisions
- Automatically creating hyperlinks in your InDesign documents
- Publishing your data as InDesign tables. With CatBase and InDesign you can create all kinds of simple and sophisticated tables.
- Exporting data to a delimited text file (csv, tab-delimited, etc.)
- Creating an Excel Spreadsheet from your database
- Creating tables with InDesign
Publishing Projects: Tell CatBase which set of data to publish and which Publishing Style Sheet to use, then just press a button to publish your data!
"Round-Tripping": bi-directional updates between CatBase and Quark or InDesign CS documents

Overviews and Examples
These are brief guides that demonstrate how CatBase can be used to complete various types of publishing project with various publishing destinations. An Overview of Database Publishing What is Database Publishing? Database Publishing Wizards Publishing Destinations Which page layout program is best? Database Publishing Options with InDesign A comparison between CatBase and InDesign's Data Merge facility Workflow Examples From MySql or Sql Server to InDesign Publishing Examples Publish a Catalog With QuarkXPress With InDesign, using XML With InDesign, using Xtags With FrameMaker An example that places each item into an individual box (for Quark and InDesign) Taking a design-led approach, where you want more manual control over the layout Creating hyperlinks in your InDesign documents Publish a Telephone Directory Publishing a "Yellow Pages" Directory Publishing a "White Pages" directory Publish a Membership Directory With QuarkXpress or Adobe InDesign Publish Classified Ads How to create a classified advertisement section for a newspaper or magazine with CatBase Variable Data Publishing Example An example that demonstrates how to create personalized letters and a telephone directory (for Quark and InDesign

These are brief guides that demonstrate how CatBase can be used to complete various types of publishing project with various publishing destinations.

Publish a Catalog

How to create a classified advertisement section for a newspaper or magazine with CatBase