Graphic Mail Merge Survey

[tjston]

With current release OO on linux.

I'm trying to do a mail merge with a different photo on each output page.

I've been fooling around with OO spreadsheet as data source.

I have fields as follows:

Name, Photo
Joe Bloggs. /path/to/jbloggs.bmp
Jane Jenkins, /path/to/janej.bmp

Of course, when I print the master document, the names print out OK, but where I want the image, it prints as the text '/path/to/image.bmp'.

So: I am thinking that EITHER I need a macro or function that inserts the appropriate image before printing OR I need to change data source. The first solution would suit me better, as with the second, I then have the problem of reading data into the data source.

Now: I thought that others must have done this before. I'm sure that they must have, but I've searched and searched, and been unable to find a tailor-made solution.

So I'm surveying the kind users of this forum, to see if anyone can guide me on from here. Any help much appreciated.

regards, Tim Johnston

[acknak]

Sorry you've not gotten an answer to your question. Have you been able to find any solutions yet?

I know there is a lot of tutorial and how-to information around the 'Net on using photos with OOo databases, have you tried a search?

[tjston]

acknak

Thanks for the message. I had given up regularly checking for replies, since none had been forthcoming for a while.

Yes, I've searched and searched on this problem. No, I've not found a solution. Google has done its regular trick of flipping from a 'font of information' to a 'tower of babel', so to speak. I believe that I need to develop an understanding of macros. But until I manage to do that, I've resigned myself to doing this manually--copy and paste repeatedly.

regards, Tim Johnston

[Dave]

OK, this is my ignorance of the facts here, so forgive me if I'm on the wrong track. My understanding of a mail merge is that one send the same letter body [even with a different image on each page] to different addressees. If I wanted a different image on each page of a document, I'd simply insert them, not try to "mail merge" them through links. Can you please clear up my misunderstanding of what is required here? I know I'm slowing down a bit as the days, weeks and years go by.

David.

[pitonyak]

I ran some experiments, and I noticed a few things, that seem to indicate that this will not work directly...

1. It looks like mail merge fields are all TEXT fields. So, you can insert text, but that is about it.

2. Sure, it let me insert an image field, but it inserted the field as a TEXT FIELD. Hmm, this look like item 1 above.

It looks to me like your database contains a reference to the image file (full path) rather than the image itself. For my testing, I created a Base document containing names and the actual image. My opinion is that you would need to use a Macro to do this, which is a sad thing.