using fields in a text document

users
#41

I use mail merge all the time - it is quick and a joy, so - I thought that I would have a real go at getting LO mail merge to work this weekend.

Mail merge unfortunately turns out to be unacceptably fragile

I finally gave up on LO 3.4 after a couple of hours (plus the hours before that) - it just does not work

I uninstalled 3.4 and installed 3.3.3 - This worked fine the first time (and never thereafter) to make a letter with the inbuilt standard contact fields (Title, First name etc) and made up 4 contact details

I noticed that the contact list is saved as a "tab" delineated spreadsheet in *.csv format.

One useful feature is that mail merge auto posts all the fields onto the letter for you, you can then move them (or delete) to a position of your choosing

You can even copy & paste fields in the letter so that the same data can appear as many times as you like on the document where you need them.

All things at this point are good, excluding the fact that there is no navigation tool bar, hence you cannot just skip to the 3rd address or the 1st or last address whilst looking at the letter. Other than that, it worked exactly as it should. So if its a small, one off and you have made no mistakes - brilliant.

closed all down it was at this point thereafter all things went wrong:-

1) On re-opening The database lost its connection to the letter and you had a chore to re-link the data fields in the *.csv file to those in the letter.

2) To add a "new contact" is too complex.

3) Merge, then adds all the fields again in bulk to the letter for a 2nd time, so you have to delete all the 1st batch

4) I thought maybe it would be better then, to add new contacts to the csv file in Calc
No problem there - up until you go back to Mail merge.
it corrupts the file in some way (or the 2 are incompatible). All the 1st and last letters of any word are missing, eg, " company" becomes "ompan" and "zip" becomes "i", and it does the same to the data, then even when you merge you get nonsense data in the fields on the letter. Henceforth, totally useless.

I thought that maybe 3.3.3 is not as stable as it should be, so I installed 3.2 and it is still the same (missing letters etc)

Mail merge should be so simple, intuitive and above all reusable.

If anybody gets this to work in a stable and repeatable way, please let me know.

Also without a WYSIWYG navigation tool bar large databases would be out of the question - you also need navigation for printing, as in practice you want to print the 1st letter (to check), auto skip to the 2nd and if the 1st one is OK then you print "print the rest" or you can print the next one (one at a time) until you get it right. LO does not have this facility.

One strange feature I noticed is that on save / print it merges and generates (in my case) all 4 letters, I assume then if you had a database of 10000 names you would have a file with 10000 letters (to big).

John B
Xp Pro sp3
LO 3.4, 3.3.3 & 3.2

#42

Hi John,

1) On re-opening The database lost its connection to the letter and you
had a chore to re-link the data fields in the *.csv file to those in the
letter.

Known bug.

2) To add a "new contact" is too complex.

Known limitation. Calc Sheets/CSV files are read only when the file is
being accessed by the mailmerge, i.e. being used as a datasource, it has
been like this for years.

3) Merge, then adds all the fields again in bulk to the letter for a
2nd time, so you have to delete all the 1st batch

Seem to recall that this too, is a known bug.

4) I thought maybe it would be better then, to add new contacts to the
csv file in Calc
No problem there - up until you go back to Mail merge.
it corrupts the file in some way (or the 2 are incompatible). All the
1st and last letters of any word are missing, eg, " company" becomes
"ompan" and "zip" becomes "i", and it does the same to the data, then
even when you merge you get nonsense data in the fields on the letter.
Henceforth, totally useless.

Also known bug, as far as I can remember.

Look up the bugs in freedesktop :

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=libreoffice+mail+merge

and also :

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34325

Alex

#43

Dear Alex

Thanks for the link, I had no idea of the shear quantity of bugs that are in the LO Mail merge feature, had I have known I would never have considered it, especially as there a numerous new ones being reported and the old ones as you say have been there for years - Mail merge in essence not only proves to me that it is unusable, but growing in this arena with others. I would think that greying out this option would be one answer, but then how would we find the bugs?

It prompts the question "does anything work" properly and when I mean properly I mean fully, no bugs, no workarounds, no macro's, no file editing, no putting one thing in front of another, with full up to date documentation & tutorials etc. - ( my granddads answer to everything > "when the revolution comes")

At present I use LO as a MS doc reader / converter for incoming email attachments, which seems to work very well (but then excluding *.rtf files) , but I would genuenly like to use LO fully in the future. But after the horror of that Bug list - the developers have some mountain to climb.

With word processing, I would have thought that once you get past fonts and indexing - mailmerge comes next in the pecking order.

One good thing - I know how to access the bug list before I explore LO further.

thanks

John B

#44

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Steven Shelton <steven@sheltonlegal.net> writes:

I do *some* of that on a regular basis in my law office, since I
send out a lot of letters that are virtually identical ("Dear
<TITLE> <FIRSTNAME> <LASTNAME>, This letter is to remind you that
your <HEARING_TYPE> is scheduled to take place on <HEARING_DATE>
at <HEARING_TIME> before Judge <JUDGENAME> . . .").

What I ended up doing is just putting a blank page at the
beginning of the document where I list all the variables, then I
just fill them in there.

How exactly do you do that? I tried to find something about this in
the documentation without success.

Someone pointed out elsewhere in this thread, but it's a big thread
and easy to miss. To insert the variables, just go to INSERT > FIELDS

OTHER (or just hit CTRL-F2). Then click on the "Variables" tab,

highlight "User Field" in the left column, give your variable a name
(no spaces!), give it a value, and hit "Insert". After that, if you
want to insert the variable you can go through the same process
(except you can just click on the name of the variable from the
"Selection" list and hit "Insert") or you can copy/paste the variable
from elsewhere. Then, any time you double-click on the variable
anywhere in the document and change the value, it changes it
throughout the document.

It's a HUGE time-saver at my office!

- --
Steven Shelton

#45

Salam,

Mail Merge is essential, crucial and very important that i never!