[libreoffice-users] Re: Mail merge manual field entry

Le 23/08/2013 03:45, Carl Paulsen a écrit :

Hi Carl,

> Thank you Alex.  I'll give your ideas some thought.  The key issue for
> me is that I can manually enter "placeholders" for fields as text that
> Salesforce can interpret for the merge on their platform (well, I think
> I can but haven't been able to test it yet).  What I can't do is enter
> any LO commands that trigger a next record or next page that Salesforce
> can interpret.

In the old report designer, before the Oracle Report Builder was 
integrated, this was a feature of the report designer wizard, which 
inserted a NextRecord (hidden field as I recall) field into a Writer 
document and used variables to fill the form with data upon next 
opening/running of the query supplying data to the form. So, in theory, 
it should be attainable in some (possibly obscure) fashion.


> All that said, I still don't really understand how LO handles mail
> merges and it seems to be tailored to those who want to generate merges
> with a Calc spreadsheet (even that should be simpler IMHO) or a Base dB
> or a connected dB for someone who knows a little more.

Well, yes, that is what mailmerges are generally based on, some kind of 
datasource which can be displayed/imported as a spreadsheet or a db 
query, à la Excel for example, and then taking that datasource and 
providing the means to insert the data to provide the mailmerge. Your 
problem is that you don't have a datasource that LO can access. At a 
minimum, LO requires either a query, a view, a CSV file, or an Excel or 
LO spreadsheet. If you are using queries or views, then these have to be 
reachable via the database functionality of LO, which means that you 
have to have a corresponding connector or connection mechanism, e.g. via 
a Basic macro that will setup the connection to your remote database 
instance, execute the query, store the resultset in a stack or array of 
some kind in a form accessible to LO, and then allow you to proceed to 
mailmerge.

There is an extension that is supposed to help with mailmerges in AOO/LO 
and which doesn't use the built-in mailmerge functionality :

http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center/mail-merge-db

Note however, that the author of the extension states that it requires a 
database in order to work (without specifying what kind of database). I 
also don't know whether this extension works with a current version of LO.

There is also the following :
http://extensions.openoffice.org/en/project/fastmailmerge

but I have no idea whether it works with LO. It requires at least a 
spreadsheet as a datasource in order to function.



Alex









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