Preparing Data for Customised Printing and Mailings

High-speed digital printing equipment allows us to produce individually-personalised postcards, presentation folders and mailings and much more inexpensively and accurately. To achieve the best results, it is well worth taking some time to 'clean' your data before sending it to us for processing. Cleaning your data can save considerable costs too, especially for postal mailings, as any mail item which cannot be delivered (for example, due to an incorrect address) is still chargeable. Similarly, duplicated items will result in unnecessary expenditure.

How to present your data

We can accept data in a variety of formats but the most common is a simple Excel spreadsheet with one record per row. We can also accept simple text files, CSV (comma-separated values) files and certain types of open format database files.

Proofing

We will generally produce PDF proofs of half a dozen or so of your records and send them to you by email so that you can check the finished results match your expectations. For sheet labels, we will produce at least two pages' worth of labels and send them as a PDF file at 100% of size.

Barcodes and other variable data

Digital prints are not limited to just text changes. We can incorporate barcodes in a variety of symbologies as well as other variable data. Each item of variable data needs to be in its own column in your spreadsheet or database. For symbologies which use a checksum, the data must include the checksum. Please feel free to send us a small sample of your data and we will be happy to check its compatibility with our system before you invest time and energy into producing the full data set.