New template mail merge problem

[smacks]

I've been searching the forums for an answer and haven't found one.

I imported a file from MS Word and changed all the formatting to fit the OO Writer, saved it under templates, and tried to us it with mail merge under use existing templates. This file is a label generation template that seemed to work fine in MS Word.
This thing is eating my brain! HELP!

The results have been varied and none successful.

Several attempts have left OO shutting down and not saving the file; Several attempts have left blank pages with incomplete files.

I've looked all over to try and find tutorials to see if I created the template wrong ( I was unable to use a Sync feature as the label template I was creating didn't exist)

It seems that Mail Merge is creating the fields but upon preview of the items that were saved and created, There is initially a blank page and then a page of labels that is incomplete and the page formatting is altered..

Not sure if this is clear enough, but if anyone can send me to a site or help with advice (on clarifying this post or the problem) I would appreciate it.

[acknak]

Greetings! Welcome to the community forum.

For a nice article giving step-by-step instructions for mail merge, see: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/art ... office_org

It may shed some light if you can attach your merge document here so we can take a look, but my own strategy is to avoid using anything imported from some other software. In the long run it's less trouble to start from scratch and do a clean layout in OOo.

[smacks]

Thanks for the welcome, acknak.

I did read that article and it didn't help much, except to tell me there wasn't really away to create a viable template on my own. I've since decided that with no real solution on creating a template that will work the way I want it to, at this time, I will just use the labels template.

I think it may have been a problem with how I was importing the spreadsheet I was using for the datasource.

Thank you again for taking the time to look over this thread.

[acknak]

... there wasn't really away to create a viable template on my own. ...

Hmm ... I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I make my own merge documents (templates?) all the time.

OOo is similar to MS Office only at the more superficial levels. Office has lots of deeper features that have no support in OOo--another reason to avoid imported documents, in my opinion.

Templates in OOo are purely static, they are almost equivalent to simply opening an existing document, modifying it, then saving it to a new file. The only difference is, with a template, you have an unnamed document: when you save it, you have to provide a name for it.