Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Hi.
I have spent all afternoon trying to use the business cards or labels feature to create business cards. I feel my sanity slowly departing. I can't get any anywhere with it, I am confronted with questions about 'pitch' - which is produced in the forests by an obscure process of heating up birch bark, I believe..
I tried with Spread sheet, it came out wrong... I can't believe that it is so difficult to produce a business card that is presentable - any ideas?
I am quite intelligent, really, I just wanted to use Openoffice for this, I have a program that I paid for that works.
thanks,
david

Title Edited. A descriptive title for posts helps others who are searching for solutions and increases your chances of a reply. (TheGurkha, Moderator)

OpenOffice--in general--is simply not mature enough of a product that you can expect to sit down and accomplish a task just by "fooling around, even if it is intelligent fooling around. The 80-20 rule of software is that it takes 20% of the effort to make the software work and 80% of the effort to make the software work well. OOo is still in the "making things work" stage.

Anyway, the take home lesson is that it really pays off to spend some time learning how the program expects to be handled, and how best to use the software to accomplish the task at hand. Thirty seconds with Google found these that may be of use:

Creating business cards with OpenOffice.org Writer | Linux Journal
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000428

Business card template | OpenOffice.org Templates
http://templates.services.openoffice.org/en/node/1163

Quick Business Cards in Openoffice.org & Template Download
http://blog.worldlabel.com/2009/quick-b ... nload.html

How to Make Business Cards in OpenOffice | eHow.com
http://www.ehow.com/how_5012544_make-bu ... ffice.html

Also, check out these general resources:
Writer Guide
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wik ... iter_Guide

OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas
http://openoffice.blogs.com

Among others...

Sorry I didn't respond before, I never did get it to work and am now retired!

On the few instances I needed business cards I set up one card, copied and pasted it vertically and laterally to fill an A4sheet, printed it on to A4 sheets of 210 gm card and just trimmed with a hand trimmer.

Sorry you never got it to work.

I've used a table to do business cards--you just do whatever works for you.

acknak wrote:Sorry you never got it to work.

I've used a table to do business cards--you just do whatever works for you.

Same here. It took about 4 tries to get everything properly aligned and I wasted one sheet of cards the first time but it worked.

When using another word processor, I always found it best to rule an A4 sheet (all my labels came in A4 size) to match the label stock, photocopy this a number of times and use these photocopies for test prints.

Fortunately since moving to OpenOffice I have needed to print no sheets of labels; for the odd package or envelope address I print onto plain paper, chop it out with an office trimmer, and paste it down wth old fashioned paste or gum.

I do business cards onto an A4 sheet of card and chop them up by trimmer.

RoryOF wrote:... I do business cards onto an A4 sheet of card and chop them up by trimmer.

There's the ticket.

I was helping a friend with some colored cards and I just took the pdf from OOo to a copy/print center. They printed a few copies off onto card stock and cut them up for me all in a few minutes. And I thought the price was quite reasonable considering I didn't have to futz around aligning everything and wasting perf sheets

One can usually feed a 160gsm card through almost any printer and a 210gsm card through a printer with a straight through path (usually for manual feed). Our house has always had paper trimmers available, so chopping up is quick. But of course, some people don't like sharp things