Badges programs Corel vs. Engravelab

[Brad Bice]

I know this has been discussed before, but not lately. I am using CorelDRAW 12 and Engravelab for various different jobs. Corel is used for 1-off jobs because it does not have a badges function for repeated use of one template with different text.

Engravelab however does this perfectly. But the program is much too expensive and requires outdated dongle technology that gets old after a few years of updating computers and expanding operations. But that is beside the point.

With the release of CorelDRAW X4, have there been any innovations lately as far as badges in Corel? We tried Namedrop Xpress and were greatly unimpressed with it compared to Engravelab's badges. We're looking for production-level efficiency here.

[Joe Pelonio]

Perhaps your quantities make it more important to have such functionality,
but I do 20-30 at a time by simply having a 12x24 page set up in Corel full of badges with names in them. Then I go to each one and just change the text to the new name, for as many as I need, then delete the extras before running.

I can't comment on X4, still using 3.

[Brad Bice]

Yes, I have many different templates that I use over and over, and in quantities of hundreds at a time. It makes changing the text by hand much too time consuming.

[Jack Harper]

Somewhere here I read a post about a video on Coreldraw's feature to auto populate fields from a text document. I watched the video and it looked pretty simple. Maybe someone will remember who posted the link.

[Scott Shepherd]

It's Roy Brewer's tutorial on how to take something from a list and populate an entire sheet with the data. It's not difficult to do, but you must follow every step perfectly or it won't work.

Basically, you setup your badges and instead of the names, you place a variable. Then when you use import the list, it takes each name and puts that in that variable. You can use different variables for name/title/etc.

Search for Roy Brewer and find his website and then look through the tutorials there. I think he did several of them on that feature, showing different applications.

[Mike Null]

Roy's web site is here.

http://www.engravingconcepts.com/

There is also a macro available from one of our members which will allow you to import a names list and place it within the badge with only a little adjustment necessary.

I am not at liberty to distribute it but if he's looking in he may send it to you.

If you have no other options convert your customers email or word document to text and paste it in your Corel file. You can change fonts and size from there and then break apart and move to the location on your template. No typing.

[matt heinzel]

I work for name tag website. We do text merge for every order. I don't understand why it is so hard. When you use a text file it works seamlessly. After the template is set up it's just a few clicks and you have a merged file. Here is an example of how our text files look.

10
\1\ \2\
\3\ \4\
\5\ \6\
\7\ \8\
\9\ \10\
\Matt\ \Engraver\
\Matt\ \Engraver\
\Matt\ \Engraver\
\Matt\ \Engraver\
\Matt\ \Engraver\

The ten says there are 10 available fields of information. Then it shows the 10 things that will be replaced followed by the 10 items to replace them. I do a bad job of explaining it.

Then in corel you just you just click the create print merge button. THen you select the file. Next to the merge buttons there will be a little thing that has your place holders in it. It should be the 1-10 you made in the file just place those where you want them on the template. (If you had a list of 1-100 those would all show up in the list). Save that file and close it. Now open the file again. Do a print merge making sure not to select or change anything on the template. Click the perform merge and do a print preview this will show your merge. Then hit cancel and the merge will show up on the template. It might sound complicated but once you have the template setup it won't be bad at all. PM me if that confused the heck out of you.