Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Has anyone seen this problem? During a simple mail merge operation a blank page is being inserted to document when the merged document is printed. The blank does not display while in the document but shows on print preview. I am using a very simle template that I constructed. The project is print inserts for a friend dvd collection and all that is required is the title and year to appear on the spine and the title on the front cover. I am using a compaq nx9010 laptop running xp pro service pack two. The printer is a deskjet 820cse. I am on openoffice version 3.1.1 000310m19 (build: 9420). I am working around the problem by printing pages listed in the print dialog (page 1,3,5,7,9....). This works but slows the process down quite a bit. I am a new user of oo and have many years experience with ms products and have never run across this kind of problem. Redoing the merge does not alter the results. Please try to help as I have more than 5000 pages to print. I will try to attach the template and a merged file (if that helps).
Thanks.
jjb

did you try back spacing all of the spaces (if any) on the blank pages

or adjusting the margins on the second to last page so more characters fit, just need to sync everything back together after you do this but not that that much of a problem

While in Writer go to
Tools / Options -> OpenOffice.org Writer / Print
(in lower 3rd of right pane under 'Other ---') uncheck [√] Print automatically inserted blank pages

To answer your question, this always happens if your basic merge doc has an odd number of page.

tn@BeWo has told you how to avoid the print problem.

To avoid blank pages all together you can use this macro to double the size of the document thus having a even number of pages.
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic ... mail+merge

Thanks everybody! Knew that there had to be something simple that I had not gotten to yet.

Thanks again,
jjb

This is quite an old post for someone with this problem to be looking at in Feb 2019 but it was the first one I came across from a google search. The reason for the reply is the solution given doesn't work on the current version (4.1.5) but I did find the solution so I thought I should mention it just in case there are still visitors to this page.
It seems that mail merge automatically inserts a blank page between each record that is printed. It seems these are called 'comments' pages and they can be turned off.
Go to File/Print, this takes you to the mail merge dialog box, press ok to then go to the print dialog box, select 'Page Layout' tab towards the top of the box, part the way down it says 'Page Sides' and below that there's a drop down box labelled 'Comments Only'. Press the down arrow and select 'None(document only)'. There's a preview panel to the left, you'll notice that when you do this the page numbers drop to the number of records you have.
Annoyingly it seems to have to change this setting for each new set of printouts.