Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: using fields in a text document

On 25/06/2011 20:32, lee wrote:
> John B<johnb@email2.me>  writes:
>
> > I have tried the mailmerge facility in LO and I as yet cannot get
> > anywhere with it.
> Hm, it's not too difficult to get to the point where you could finally
> save, print or send your documents. Just make sure that there are no
> unmatched fields. As someone described, you can even drag and drop
> fields from a database into your document.
>
> I could use mailmerge if it would reliably send the documents rather
> than sometimes say "0 of 0 messages sent" despite there are two messages
> to be sent --- and if the PDF created that way wasn't messed up. And it
> would even be really useful if changing the "properties" when sending
> documents as PDF would work rather than crash LO.
I use mail merge all the time - it is quick and a joy, so - I thought 
that I would have a real go at getting LO mail merge to work this weekend.

Mail merge unfortunately  turns out to be unacceptably fragile

I finally gave up on LO 3.4 after a couple of hours (plus the hours 
before that) - it just does not work

I uninstalled 3.4 and installed 3.3.3 - This worked fine the first time 
(and never thereafter) to make a letter with the inbuilt standard 
contact fields (Title, First name etc) and made up 4 contact details

I noticed that the contact list is saved as a "tab" delineated 
spreadsheet in *.csv format.

One useful feature is that mail merge auto posts all the fields onto the 
letter for you, you can then move them (or delete) to a position of your 
choosing

You can even copy & paste fields in the letter so that the same data can 
appear as many times as you like on the document where you need them.

All things at this point are good, excluding the fact that there is no 
navigation tool bar, hence you cannot just skip to the 3rd address or 
the 1st or last address whilst looking at the letter. Other than that, 
it worked exactly as it should. So if its a small, one off and you have 
made no mistakes - brilliant.

closed all down it was at this point thereafter all things went wrong:-

1) On re-opening The database lost its connection to the letter and you 
had a chore to re-link the data fields in the *.csv file to those in the 
letter.

2) To add a "new contact" is too complex.

3) Merge, then adds all the fields again in bulk  to the letter for a 
2nd time, so you have to delete all the 1st batch

4) I thought maybe it would be better then, to add new contacts to the 
csv file in Calc
No problem there - up until you go back to Mail merge.
it corrupts the file in some way (or the 2 are incompatible). All the 
1st and last letters of any word are missing, eg, " company" becomes 
"ompan" and "zip" becomes "i", and it does the same to the data, then 
even when you merge you get nonsense data in the fields on the letter. 
Henceforth, totally useless.

I thought that maybe 3.3.3 is not as stable as it should be, so I 
installed 3.2 and it is still the same (missing letters etc)

Mail merge should be so simple, intuitive and above all reusable.

If anybody gets this to work in a stable and repeatable way, please let 
me know.

Also without a WYSIWYG navigation tool bar large databases would be out 
of the question - you also need navigation for printing, as in practice 
you want to print the 1st letter (to check), auto skip to the 2nd and if 
the 1st one is OK then you print "print the rest" or you can print the 
next one (one at a time) until you get it right. LO does not have this 
facility.

One strange feature I noticed is that on save / print it merges and 
generates  (in my case) all 4 letters, I assume then if you had a 
database of 10000 names you would have a file with 10000 letters (to big).


John B
Xp Pro sp3
LO 3.4, 3.3.3 & 3.2






























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