I prefer InDesign for creating large page layout documents, like 80page brochures and such. I worked with Quark for years and years and consistently felt it was the spawn of a hell dimension. I find InDesign to be a better interface and tool overall. and as Silent Knight said, it's super sweet in terms of integration with other adobe programs.

As far as importing 800 items of documentation, you may want to hunt around on the web or on the Adobe InDesign forums. I imagine you're not the first person to try to manage such a large quantity of info and there are probably some tricks out there. offhand I'd recommend breaking up the catalog into sections. not only is it tedious and maddenng to go through that many pages in an electronic file, but it also will make your system crawl. plus, if the file becomes problematic or corrupt, you've lost everything. whereas if it's split into sections, you've only lost part of the work.

just another thought... perhaps this is a good time to convince your boss to move online? an online catalog can be cheaper and easier to maintain in some situations.

If you learn InDesign and see how graceful it is you will realize it is 1000 times better than Quark.
I used Quark for years, now I wish InDesign was around 14 years ago and that Quark never existed.
InDesign is intuitive and graceful.
Sooo easy to use.

I work on circulars for a large retailer and this is what we do. However, you'll need someone with a little programing experience up front to get things going. It's also very important to set up the Excel spreadsheet correctly so that the cells get propagated with the proper data. Our templates include stylesheets that automatically format the imported data.

Since we use the templates over and over again, the upfront programing and setup time was well worth the effort. If you're going to do only one catalogue, it may not be worth your time, depending upon how large the catalogue is. If you're going to produce catalogues on an on-going basis, I would definitely recommend setting up a database or spreadsheet and then importing the data.

I too currently use InDesign after years using Quark. I know all this is possible with InDesign, but having only used Quark mimimally the past few years, I'm not sure what it's capabilities are and whether the above scenario is possible. Although, I do think it likely as Quarks been around for years in a variety of publishing environments. Quark also has a ton of third-party extensions and one may facilitate what you're trying to do. You'll need to do some research. Start with Quarks website.