How to Produce a Price List

Got some data that you want to turn into a good-looking price list?

Whether you need to produce a simple list of products and prices, or a more sophisticated price list with product descriptions and pictures, the basic steps are the same:

1. Check that your data is consistently organised

For example, if your product information is entered into a spreadsheet, make sure that each product is contained within one row and each column contains one item of data - the product name, or the price, or the description, etc.

2. Decide what software you're going to use to publish the price list

Suitable choices include page layout programs such as Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress, and word processing programs such as Microsoft Word. A word processor will give you good results, but if you want to produce a sophisticated price list, a page layout program such as InDesign offers many more style and formatting options. But they are not as simple to use as Word!

3. Design your price list

Whichever publishing solution you're going to use, you will need to create a template and a design. Things to consider include the page headers and footers; page numbering; the number of columns on a page; which fonts to use; what information to include for each product; and the page size and orientation. You can find plenty of example templates on the internet - just search for "price list templates for InDesign" or "price list examples for Word" or similar.

4. Tag your data

Tags tell the page layout program or word processor how to style each item. Usually the tags are in the form of stylesheet names. For example, you might tag the product name with a stylesheet called "product name" and the description with a stylesheet called "text". Each solution has its own tagging system ... some are more