Re: [libreoffice-users] Mail merge

Dear Alex

Thanks for the link, I had no idea of the shear quantity of bugs that 
are in the LO Mail merge feature, had I have known I would never have 
considered it, especially as there a numerous new ones being reported  
and the old ones as you say have been there for years - Mail merge in 
essence not only proves to me that it is unusable, but growing in this 
arena with others. I would think that greying out this option would be 
one answer, but then how would we find the bugs?

It prompts the question "does anything work" properly and when I mean 
properly I mean fully, no bugs, no workarounds, no macro's, no file 
editing, no putting one thing in front of another, with full up to date 
documentation & tutorials etc. - ( my granddads answer to everything > 
"when the revolution comes")

At present I use LO as a MS doc reader / converter for incoming email 
attachments, which seems to work very well (but then excluding *.rtf 
files) , but I would genuenly like to use LO fully in the future. But 
after the horror of that Bug list - the developers have some mountain to 
climb.

With word processing, I would have thought that once you get past fonts 
and indexing - mailmerge comes next in the pecking order.

One good thing - I know how to access the bug list before I explore LO 
further.


thanks

John  B
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



On 26/06/2011 22:10, Alexander Thurgood wrote:
> Le 26/06/11 16:44, John B a écrit :
>
> Hi John,
>
>
> > 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.
> Known bug.
>
>
> > 2) To add a "new contact" is too complex.
> Known limitation. Calc Sheets/CSV files are read only when the file is
> being accessed by the mailmerge, i.e. being used as a datasource, it has
> been like this for years.
>
>
>
> > 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
> Seem to recall that this too, is a known bug.
>
>
> > 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.
> Also known bug, as far as I can remember.
>
>
> Look up the bugs in freedesktop :
>
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=libreoffice+mail+merge
>
>
> and also :
>
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34325
>
>
>
>
> Alex
>
>
>
>
>
> Internal Virus Database is out of date.
> Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
> Version: 9.0.901 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/3714 - Release Date: 06/19/11 19:33:00


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