Sales Literature Publishing System – Flexible outputs

Once you have stored your product details in the database, it is simple to create sales and marketing literature without retyping a thing. Simply choose the Output command and pick the type of output you want.

You could output, for example:

• price lists of a selection of products (say ones you are showing at an exhibition)
• one-page flyers describing a product in detail
• product information sheet for you salesforce (basic details, key features, and comparison with competition)
• a personalised letter to a customer containing details of a product and/or a price list of various products
• complete product catalogues, including indexes and cross-references to specialised subject catalogues, or new products catalogues

The contents and format of these outputs is completely under the user's control. You decide:

• which products or types of product are included in each section of the output, and what order they should appear in
• what items of information should be output for each product and in what order
• what formatting should be applied to the various items of information; this is normally done via styles, so that all the detailed format decisions (font, size, colour etc) have been made when the designer sets up the templates in QuarkXPress, Word, DreamWeaver etc.
• which pricing system to use, the date at which prices should be valid (so future prices are used where appropriate), and the currencies

The final result of the output can be:

• a QuarkXPress file, with all the information ready-formatted (fonts, colours, spacing, rules etc) with just the final editing-to-fit and dropping-in of pictures to be carried out
• a Microsoft Word (RTF) file, similarly o an HTML file, for display on the internet, which can even be automatically uploaded on your web server
• a text file, for export to other database systems or for inclusion in a CD-ROM

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