Mail Merge Salutation

users
#1

I'm trying to do a mail merge using the wizard (is there any other way?), and I'm having great difficulty making it do what I need to do.

My data has one field for the name. A sample name is "Gary L & Judy A Smith". I simply want it to say "Dear Gary L & Judy A Smith," or even better "Dear Gary & Judy Smith,". **I'm unable to accomplish this simple task. Instead, the best I can come up with is "Dear Mrs. Gary L & Judy A Smith"**which is close, but forces me to use a salutation I don't want. Turning off salutations means I don't get the "Dear anything, " which is not what I want either.*

#2

Hi :slight_smile:
Sorry you don't seem to have had any answers! Have you been able to
solve the problem? If not then it might be worth asking again to see
if anyone missed it before or if anyone new has arrived.

I get the impression that whatever the wizard produces is possible to
edit quite heavily? Also i think it might be better to start with a
fresh empty Writer document and use Mail-merge to connect it to a
database and then you can insert fields into appropriate paces and
edit the whole document as a fairly normal Writer document. I think
the limitation on that is that it won't let you input new data into
the database that way.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#3

I don't see any way to avoid the "Dear" in the automatic salutation, but that shouldn't be a problem. You can drop all sorts of data from your database into a mail merge letter, of course: indeed, one normally needs to do exactly that, not to send an exact copy of the same letter to everyone. So you can simply select not to have a salutation, but then to enter your plain "Dear " and a field for the name in the appropriate place in your letter - creating your own salutation.

o Go to Insert | Fields > | Other... | Database.
o Under Type, select Mail merge fields.
o Under Database selection, expand your database and select the name field.

(I think this is part of the answer to your "is there any other way?")

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker