A custom software solution for Microsoft® Word has drastically cut the cost of producing an on-line catalog for Bud Plant Comic Art, Grass Valley, California.

The company's printed catalog is produced using Quark® XPress desktop publishing software. Converting the catalog files into usable HTML files was a time-consuming, error-prone task.

The catalog copy starts out as a desktop publishing file suitable for printout. 

The macro applies HTML tags and divides the tagged text into separate database fields.

The conversion was made more difficult by the fact that the company's internet service provider required the HTML code to be stored in a database with separate fields for book descriptions, prices, graphics, and other data. Descriptions that exceed 255 characters had to be broken into multiple fields of less than 255 characters each.

A further complicating factor involved a tendency to lose paragraph style and formatting information when exporting the catalog copy. To counter this problem, the company decided to export its catalog files to Microsoft Word, where the data could be manipulated by a macro program.

I developed a macro to apply HTML tags to the catalog copy and to divide the tagged text into separate database fields. The macro automatically detects when a book description exceeds the capacity of the database and transfers such descriptions to a separate error file so that processing can continue without interruption.