Automated Find & Replace from Excel???

[Hopkins Printing]

I have a catalog with approximately 4000 products in a Quark document. Each product has an existing SKU number. The catalog is being re-printed for a different client and needs ALL the SKU numbers to be changed (everything else stays the same).

I have an Excel spreadsheet with two columns of information: Column A has the existing SKU number and Column B has the new SKU number.

Is it possible to some how automate Quark's Find & Replace feature (or other feature?) to search for each existing SKU number (column A from the spreadsheet) and replace it with its corresponding new SKU number (column B from the spreadsheet) in the Quark document?

Replacing each SKU number manually would be a painfully slow process.

I only have regular QuarkXPress...NO Quark Server or Dynamic Publishing Products.

Thanks,
Jon :-)

[mattbeals]

Apago has the technology to search and replace text in a PDF. It's not in a "off the shelf" program now, but it could easily be created. If I understand what you're wanting to do is have column A be the text string you want searched and column B contains the new text strings. That certainly can be done and is being done like I said. We'd have to have a CSV or tab delimited text file for the input. The text replacement would be done using the same text attributes as the original text. We wouldn't be able to wrap lines, but that shouldn't be an issue. The search/replace function in the PDF can be done pretty quickly. Are you looking to batch process multiple files or just one at a time?

Contact me off list and we can figure it out.

[Colorblind]

If you're using a mac, AppleScript could probably do that. Post that question to both www.macscripter.net and Quark AppleScript forum at QuarkXPress and AppleScript - Quark Forums

Good luck.