Templates are a very effective tool that you can use to make your book look professionally designed. We spent part of our development season working on templates, so now they look more professional, and are easier to use than ever. Coupled with our cropping tool, you can now crop each image to fit perfectly into your template on its way in. Alternately, use the auto flow template wizard to flow templates to multiple pages, and automatically populate them with your favorite candid images.
It’s September! As usual, we like to celebrate the back to school season with a new release of our Yearbook authoring software. This development season we’ve primarily been working to keep the program up to date with the most recent operating systems, on both Windows and Mac. We’ve also been working on updating our program’s interface, making it more intuitive to use, and with fewer errors.
New Price Point:
It’s no secret that we’re competing against a growing online market. Even though the online solutions available today aren’t as reliable as our desktop solution, the convenience and marketability of them can make for a tough sale. We’re pleased to announce that we substantially lowered the license costs for our desktop software. As of this season, we’re selling individual licenses for $75 each. Folks who are signed up as our publishers receive a discount on all licenses. We hope that this makes it easier for you to market our solution to your schools.
Branding is Now Included in Publisher Renewal Fee:
We’ve always offered branding in our software, but until now we’ve been charging $500.00 for this service, on top of our standard publisher signup or renewal fee. As of this season, we will begin offering branding (Your company’s logo and contact information) to all of our publishers, included in the regular publisher signup/renewal fees. We will still be charging a premium if you need custom artwork, panels, or page sizes, but the charge for these will be much lower than previous years as well.
Edge Effects are Back:
Our customers spoke, and we listened! Edge effects (The clipping masks that can be used on portraits and candids) have been added back into the page editor, and the panel flow wizard. We still have the same draw problem where the transparent parts show up as white on the page editor, but the transparency is crisp and perfect in every PDF. Enjoy!
Major Bugs Resolved:
Last season we released a new page editor, and as is typical with new technology, we did run into a few annoying bugs. Thankfully we were able to work around these issues last season, but the better news is that we’ve resolved most of them for this season. The PDF errors (Box size, and dropping backgrounds to name a couple of the majors) have been resolved, a few of the buttons have been rearranged to make things feel more natural, and a full round of testing has gone into the major features and functions.
Yearbooks Desktop is developed and supported by Northwestern Support Professionals Inc., of Nanaimo, BC, Canada. We are a small independent software publishing studio and are 100% proudly Canadian owned and operated. Please visit our corporate website at NWSP.ca.
Sales & Product Inquiries and to Request a Demo
Our sales team is available at your convenience to provide you and your team with a 30-minute online demo. Click here to send us a meeting request, the online form is on the right side of the Download page.
You may also send an email to support@yearbooksdesktop.com to reach our sales department, or call us directly at 1-877-661-9990.
Technical Support and Software Development Inquiries
Click here to send us a support ticket request. You may also send an email to support@yearbooksdesktop.com, or call us directly at 1-877-661-9990.
Technical Support is available between the hours of 8:00 AM PST and 3:30 PM PST, Monday to Friday (excluding Canadian holidays).
Yearbooks Product Manual and Tutorials
Our documentation for Tallys can be found online at support.yearbooksdesktop.com and is updated frequently throughout the year.
Online Training Videos
We have gone to great lengths to create many online training videos to help you through common problems and to demonstrate some of the more powerful features. Check out our YouTube channel by clicking here.
Knowledge Base and Support Forums
Solutions to many common problems can be quickly found in our knowledge base and forums. Please visit support.yearbooksdesktop.com and register a free account.
Please contact us if you have any questions.
Contact us by Email or Phone
You may send an email to support@yearbooksdesktop.com to reach our sales department, or call us directly at 1-877-661-9990.
Connect with us on Social Media
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Contact us by Mail or in Person
We are located at 549 Haliburton Street, Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada, V9R 4W4.
The Professional School Photographers Association (PSPA) has been defining the industry standard for photo CD’s in the yearbook industry for many years. Obviously, our program is built to work based on this standard, so we’re dedicating today’s blog post to all things PSPA.
For a look at the PSPA website, click here.
We have posted all of our PSPA related help documents and tech notes to our support site. Check them out here! This page includes instructions for importing PSPA and non PSPA CD’s into our Yearbooks program as well.
One of the first steps we face when creating a digital Yearbook is to import the student information into the program. Once the data is loaded in, creating and organizing your pages is fairly easy, so we’ve posted some tips to assist you with your import.
Usually, photographers will provide you with a PSPA Photo CD, which is a CD that contains all of your student’;s pictures, and an index file that has been set up based on the industry standard. This is a very common format in the industry, so don’t be afraid to ask your photgrapher for PSPA output.
Once you have your PSPA CD, importing it into Yearbooks Desktop is fairly straight forward, as is outlined in these step by step instructions on our support site. Once your data has been imported, the program makes it very easy to correct spelling errors, adjust classes, and add or remove individual students.
But what happens if your photographer can not provide you with a PSPA CD? Don’t worry, Yearbooks Desktop can import non-industry standard CD’s as well. Just follow this handy guide from our support site, and you’ll have your non-PSPA data loaded in no time.
Remember, our team has been importing data into Yearbooks Desktop for years, so if you run in to a snag anywhere along the way, contact our friendly support team.
Autumn was also known as the harvest season in the earlier days. It is so because this season provides the ideal conditions for harvesting crops, fruits and vegetables. Wheat ripens during this season. In fact in most of North America, the famous harvest celebrations takes place during autumn. Surprisingly, this overabundance of beauty can lead to unique challenges when it comes to snapping photos. Here is an article that discusses some of these challenges, and suggests methods to overcome them. Have a read through, to ensure that your photos look their best.
September is coming to and end, and we are reaching the end of our launch. Yearbooks Desktop is more popular than ever this season, as people are excited about inexpensive alternatives for their yearbook solution.
We’ve been strengthening our support system daily, by adding tutorial videos, and help articles on our support page. Watch for new content every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday!
Are you following us on Twitter yet? Did you know that you can launch support tickets from there, as well as facebook? Whichever channel is most convenient for you, we’ll be there!
Do you recognize the header and footer used on this blog? If not, you should learn about banners! Learn about them in the help manual, or just try them out in the software!
Instructions on how to move your pages around, as well as tips for working with two page spreads have been added to our support site! The friendly support team at Northwestern Support Professionals is standing by to assist you with any question
s you have about our software, and help you overcome and problems you encounter. That’s why we invest so much time creating support forums, help documents, and tutorial videos to help you along your way.
Today’s featured articles?
New articles are added every few days!