ePlaice / For the Best Software on the Net
Mainly Free and Open Source Software
Open Office Navigation
OOBase Database | OOCalc Spreadsheet | OODraw Vector Graphics | OOImpress Presentation | OOWriter Word Processor Using Mail Merge
Latest news
Aug 29: This is the first live use of the new web template from Andreas Viklund. I still have some tidying up to do but I was very pleased at how easy these templates are to use.
Links:
Mail Merge Wizard
A good test for an Office system is the ease with which a Mail Merge can be set up. Open Office comes with a Wizard, so I decided to try this in conjunction with a MySQL name and address database. The following gives some idea of the problems encountered and how they were overcome.
This section needs an update, because it has not been touched since I tried an early beta version of mail merge. I found a few problems and then gave up, so I am hoping that when I come to look at this again I can proceed with a full test.
Setting up the Name and Address Database
I used the contact data held in Thunderbird to export to a csv file and then selectively loaded up a MySQL database. The aim is to create a master name and address database that can be used across all my applications, in order to avoid maintaining the same information more than once. In order to match with the fields required for mailmerge, your database requires to at least contain the following :-
Title
First Name
Surname
Company Name
Address Line 1
Address Line 2
Town or City
County or State
Post Code or Zip
Country
Home Phone Number
Business Phone Number
email address
Gender
Connecting to the Database
The procedure has already been described in the database section. Basically, you must first set up a connection and create a new Open Office database object. First go to File/New/Database which will bring up the Database Wizard. Then choose Connect to an existing database and select MySQL and press Next. Then select Connect using JDBC and press Next. Then you will be asked to enter the name of the database and your user URL. The next steps will ask you for a user name and password; save and exit the wizard and you are all set to go. You only need to create the database object once; in future when you want to connect to the database you will just be prompted for the password.
Mail Merge Wizard
Go to Tools/Mail Merge Wizard and you will be prompted to select the starting document and you have a choice of current document, creating new document, existing document (use browse to select), template or recently saved starting document. After pressing Next you will be taken to select Document type which will normally be Letter.
Using the Address Database
You will then be asked to Insert an Address Block which can be set up as a DBF file or in this case we are going to use the fields from the MySQL address database. The first task is to select your MySQL address database - I tried to use Filter but nothing happened so currently every record will be selected. Next you have choices for address blocks; the preset ones look fine for the USA and Germany but need modifying for the UK so that the Post code (Zip) appears after the City instead of the default before. Also, you seem to be limited to four address lines which may cause problems with some UK addresses, meaning you have to place several items on the same address line. Once you are happy with the basic arrangement of the address block you then need to map your database fields to the Address Block fields. This is reasonably straightforward, although you are somewhat limited by the preset selection of fields. At the moment I have not found a way to modify these field names - but there is nothing to stop you using an existing field for a different purpose. One small point is that you can suppress the country field for UK addresses and keep it for foreign addresses.
Creating Salutation
I tried several times without success to set up a salutation based on the gender of the person. Unfortunately, there seems to be an error and I obtained multiple salutations on each letter; one for Male, one for Female plus a general salutation. Maybe it's something I did wrong, but if so then this part is not intuitive. So temporarily I've given up with mailmerge, but if nothing else I have a nice little address book set up in a MySQL database which gives me a reference for the future.