Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

The mail merge facility in Base is too restrictive.

I run a Clinical Hypnotherapy practice and print out my case notes from Lotus Approach merged into Lotus WordPro. I interspese my field names throughout the case note form with things such as clinic, fee, date of first appointment, name, address, DOB, phone number, doctor's and consultant's names and prelimnary notes. All OO will let me do it seems is to write a letter or email in what OO decides is an acceptable format. Any chance we could be allowed the option of the freedom to create the document we want with a user defined structure?

OO Does not care at all what sort of document you're merging into. All you need is the database fields placed in a normal Writer document wherever you want the data to appear.

If you're trying to use the Mail Merge wizard, forget it. It's not necessary; you can do everything manually without restriction.

For a nice article giving step-by-step instructions for mail merge (without using the wizard), see: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/art ... office_org

Thanks Acknack, That looks very promising, I will bookmark that page and read it more slowly later.

Whilst this appears to have given me a solution I hope the OO Gods have taken note of my comments and will add a 'Free form' option to the mail merge options for those poor souls who hit the same issue in the future.

I followed the procedure and when I pressed print the dialog box offered me the option of printing all 715 records or particular record numbers, the option to select to print according to some criterion was not selectable, any ideas?

However, as I wanted to print the last record I was able to do this and once I have sorted out a few formatting issues it should work well, thank you for your help.

This old blog post is still applicable http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/labels/ and may help.

For single-record tasks, I prefer to skip the File > Print ... merge process and instead display the data sources panel (View > Data Sources ...). From there, you have some manual options for merging data: select records and click the "Data to Fields" button, or drag rows or fields into the document, as text or a table.