How do I make a nice Catalog booklet

Is there a simple way to print the catalog?

Yes. First you should click on the "Printable view" link to disable page scrolling and load all the items on one large 'page'. Then, you can do File-PrintPreview, you can click on the Landcape icon (or use Alt-L) so that if you actually print it out it will look a lot better.
If you don't have a file menu, look for an icon that looks like a printer with a drop-down arrow, or try Alt-P.

To make a fancy book fold printed catalog, you have to do a lot more work, but you can achieve a very nice result.
I just revised this help doc 2/11 to walk you thru it step by step guide to catalog generation process to produce the book-fold printed catalog we distribute a week or two ahead of the auction.

Here are the merge templates you'll need:

Catalog Items Template
Template for Calendar Section (to list items by date)
Template for live items only
FirstUU Sample Catalog

Here are some optional templates that you might also find helpful

Optional Bid Sheets Template Gives you more control but the web-based system lets you print new ones on-the-fly whereas this is more for a batch job a few days prior
Dinners only Template A different format with pre-printed bid amounts
Fixed Price Items Template A different format for fixed price items
Addendum template (needs to be updated to use new lastModified column instead of createdOn column)

You might also want to make PowerPoint for your live items following this example (This is all manual - If anyone knows how to mail-merge to powerpoint slides, let me know!):
Live Power Point Show

Here's an important tip I just discovered to fix annoying cutoff at 255 chars.

Jim I was going thru your catalog and have the following questions –

on your calendar template – can the day be added? – I have found that fewer mistakes are made when both the date and the day are put together when giving the date for anything. Obviously not essential.

Sure. If you look at the auction.xls spreadsheet (this is the file that you can download using the "Backup" feature from the Admin menu), you'll see a bunch of columns corresponding roughly to the catalog columns. Then, at cell V and columns to the right after that, it's all spreadsheet formulas. This is where I use Excel to re-format some of the items, including one called "event_on_day" and "event_on_dat". By including <> in the template, you can get the day of the week as you desire.

One other question has arisen about editing the catalog, especially for those entries where individuals enter the donations themselves online (I suspect we’ll need to re-word at least a few things!). How do we know what is “new” and what has been previously reviewed?

Good question. New Items will appear at the top of the online catalog (the system keeps track of the initial entry date for each item). There is also a last-modified date, but this isn't shown. The only place you can see it is if you 'Backup' from the admin menu to an excel file. The addendum merge template makes use of it to only show the items that have changed since a particular date (you have to change the date to whenever you exported for the main catalog)

Also, how do we do ‘spell-check’?

Similar answer - the system doesn't do it, but I think you can paste the data into a word processor and check it there, then make corrections back online.

If I understand what is labeled as "last modified date" Can I use this to be able to offer an "additional entries catalog"? If not, how would I create one if that is possible? I love your software, we have had a few glitches but were able to overcome. Also, some photo's printed sideways, do I need to retake picture and try again? Or is there a better solution? Thank you

During the mail-merge process, you can 'select recipients' - it's one of the first steps. From there you will see a Filter option - do that, and choose the last modified field, and then choose "greater than" from the list, and put in the date of the last item that got included. Try that with the 'addendum template' above.

New - As of 2/2017 I tried including pictures in our book fold catalog. I decided it was too much paper and work, but I did make some changes to make it easier - if your catalog is smaller you might want to give it a go. The secret is to use a mail merge function called INCLUDEPICTURE. Google that for details, but I've updated the "Image" column in the spreadsheet so that it will work with this function. Using a template that looks like { INCLUDEPICTURE "{ MERGEFIELD "Image" }" \d } you can get it to pull in the images into the merge document. It will use the same image for all the items at first so you have to press control-a then F9 to update all the fields (this takes a while). I used this process this year to produce not a catalog but a starting point for my live powerpoint to make the copy/paste process easier. If you find a way to resize them please let me know - I had to manually resize each image, which can be very time consuming. I read there's a way to do it with a fixed size 'frame' (start with a text box, then convert-to-frame, then put the includepicture into it) but I didn't quite get it to work.

Here is a very simple way to print a basic catalog with images - try this:

  1. Use the Firefox browser
  2. Go to the Catalog List view
  3. Click printable view near the top right corner
  4. Click the Item column header to re-sort the items by category and item number
  5. Press Control-P to print preview. Firefox has a very helpful default setting called fit-to-page scale factor - it makes it look good in either portrait or landscape. IE and Chrome don't have that feature - you have to use the printer dialog and guess at the %reduction that makes it fit.