The Joy of Sets

Can you remember which records you want to publish in a particular publication? Is it all the records in one table? Just the companies in North America? Only the products on special offer? Only the ones that are in the “Over 50s” category? A selection that you chose manually? Use CatBase’s  Set Manager to create and maintain any number of sets of data!

What a Set can do

Sets can be used in two ways:

1. You tell the Set Manager which table to draw data from and how to determine which records to include in the Set.
2. You can create an “ad-hoc” set and save it

Using the Set Manager

The Set Manager lets you define Sets – or selections – of data based on one or more criteria that you specify. CatBase will then keep the set updated so that if records are added, modified, or deleted they will be included or excluded from the set, as appropriate.

Here’s an example of a Set that includes all customers in either Australia or New Zealand:

Set Manager - Australia and New Zealand

Creating an “ad-hoc” set

You’ve just done a rather complicated query and found a set of records that you might want to revisit. Or maybe you manually selected some companies that you want to target for a marketing campaign and you need to have a way of instantly finding that same selection again.

No problem!

Choose Save these Records as a Set from the File menu and enter a name for the set. If you subsequently want to change the records in that set, simply re-save them with the same name; you’ll be asked if you want to replace the existing set.

How Sets can be used

• View your set at any time: Click on the Find Data button on the main window and choose the appropriate table from the pop-up menu, then select the set name from the pop-up menu in the middle section of the Search Dialogue Window
• Use the set in a Publishing Project
• Create an Event in the Event Scheduler to automatically update the set according to a specified schedule

There’s a detailed tutorial on the Set Manager on our web site.

Free Database Publishing eBook

We get lots of questions about database publishing:

• What exactly IS database publishing?
• How does it work?
• How can I use it?
• What can I do with it?
• What tools are available?

The short answer is that you can use database publishing techniques to automate the production of publications such as catalogs, directories, price lists, classified ads, school yearbooks … just about any sort of publication that’s based on data from a database or spreadsheet.

I’ve written a book that explains it all. Well, perhaps not ALL, as it’s a big topic. But my book explains what it’s all about and helps you to get started.

The book is called The Database Publishing Handbook and you can get a free copy here.

Cool tricks with InDesign Tables

With CatBase you can create some very cool InDesign tables! Here’s an example from a stationery catalogue that was created with CatBase:

How does it do that?
You can create Table Styles to specify the basic characteristics of a table: whether it has a header row, borders, row and column fills, etc. But the Table Styles options are limited to what you can do with InDesign tables. However, with CatBase you can also choose the styling for each column:

• choose a different background colour for each column
• set a different style for each column
• set a specific width or let CatBase calculate the width based on the contents of a column
• specify a static column header or use a field from the database

More examples of tables created by CatBase:

Find out more about how to publish lovely tables!