Document merging for dummies

[psilocybe]

You are aware that LibreOffice / OpenOffice offers a mail merge function allowing you to produce personalized documents using a data source.

To be able to carry out the production of such mails, we must have access to the different components:

• A data source or database composed of tables themselves composed of columns.

• A mailing list allowing to choose in the data source the mails to be produced.

• A document type or model which is a Writer file (odt file) in which merge fields have been inserted. A merge field being a column of a table in the data source.

LibreOffice / OpenOffice allows us to easily produce the document type or model, but does not provide anything to produce the data source and the mailing lists.
Although it is possible to create and maintain such a data source in Base, it remains complicated, even unaffordable for someone who has never managed databases (we can say for everyone... ) and in the same way, the management of the mailing lists can be managed by Base which allows to create SQL queries although it remains complicated for anyone.

But in fact without knowing it, we all manage a data source: these are our present contacts on our Android phone.
This data source allows you to create as many contacts as necessary and offers more than 60 different fields (columns) for these contacts.

In order to overcome these two remaining difficulties, I decided to make two extensions available:

• gContactOOo

• smtpMailerOOo

The first allows you to find in Base the copy of your contacts present at Google and to be the data source to merge your documents.
The second allows you to create your mailing lists.

It is good to point out that for the moment only sending by e-mail is possible, the output to a printer will perhaps be available one day...

You should find all the necessary documentation for the implementation of such document merging, I remain at your disposal in case of problems.

[psilocybe]

For all those who prefer to favor a non-proprietary solution only composed of free software, it is possible to replace the extension gContactOOo by the extension vCardOOo.

This extension will allow you to find in Base all your Contacts present on a NextCloud server and to be the data source to merge your documents.